


There's blood in my body (I'm holding on)

by ms_scarlet



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (past) - Freeform, (this is maybe making it sound darker than it is there are some bad memories okay), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Drug Addiction, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone swears like sailors, F/M, Female Friendship, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Drug Addiction, Recreational Drug Use, Smut, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 18:05:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13276968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_scarlet/pseuds/ms_scarlet
Summary: She misses him the way she would miss a sense or a body part; she misses him like something that was always a part of her, even though, realistically, she’d only known him for four years compared to the rest of her life. She misses him like something vital she’d never considered what it would be like to be without until suddenly she was.Modern AU - Clarke hasn’t seen her best friend for six years and then suddenly she does.





	There's blood in my body (I'm holding on)

**Author's Note:**

> For [verbaepulchellae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbaepulchellae/pseuds/verbaepulchellae)/[verbam](http://verbam.tumblr.com/), because she is the best and this fic literally wouldn’t exist without her (literally literally, not hyperbolic literally). Gigantic thank you to [storyskein](http://archiveofourown.org/users/storyskein/pseuds/storyskein) for betaing and also being the best.
> 
> Title from Night Flowers by Lo-Ghost which can be found on the [playlist for this fic](https://open.spotify.com/user/megmo42/playlist/0jm4tOgiA7DaoJM7Nv4i7s) if you’re into that kind of thing.

Honestly, some nights the thought of facing her demons made relapse seem like the better option.

The party is loud and bright and warm, everything a gathering advertised as a Big Gay Housewarming should be. Clarke perches on the arm of the couch and leans against the wall, out of the way but with a strategic view of the door. She remembers back when she used to be at the center of the party but now she’s content, grateful even, to just let her head fall back and close her eyes. The slow, pulsing bass of the music thrums against her skin, a stark contrast to the buzzing, sparking nerves underneath.

A chorus of _heeeeeyyyys_ signal another arrival and Clarke’s shoulders tense. She squeezes her eyes shut tighter and takes a deep breath, trying to find her center. It’s no good. She peeks between her lashes, scanning the crowd by the door.

It’s not him.

The air leaves her lungs in a rush. She isn’t sure if it’s the momentary lack of oxygen or the intense cocktail of relief, disappointment, and fear pressing down on her chest that makes her head spin.

She realizes she’s chewing on her thumbnail when a piece of nail polish flakes off on her lip. She frowns at the white blot in the chipped black polish. It frowns back, judging her.

_Get a grip, Griffin._

Someone starts tapping a plastic champagne flute. Harper had handed them out as things began to ramp up, her split-second hesitation before giving an empty one to Clarke only noticeable if you were paying attention.

“This is a classy party and shit,” she’d said with a grin, twining her pinky with Monroe’s as they came up behind her, pressing their face into Harper’s neck before hooking their chin over her shoulder and greeting her with a lazy _what up?_

The tapping catches on and spreads through the room as partygoers start banging their flutes against any available hard surface, turning to whoops and cheers as Miller swoops Monty into a dramatic dip and deep kiss beneath the twinkly lights of Clarke and Raven’s present affixed to the wall.

The sign is a kaleidoscope of overlapping mismatched scrap metal welded together by Raven with _Minty & Harpoe’s Big Gay Home _painstakingly stamped out of the sheets by Clarke. They’d hooked rainbow lights all over the back so that the letters glow and the jagged edges cast fractal shadows on the wall.

“Well, that’s it,” Monty had said when they’d dragged it in the door. “We’ll have to live together until we die because my life is no longer complete without this sign and if we have to fight for it, Monroe can take all of us.”

“Nope, check it out.” Raven had pivoted the sign around. “We rigged it up so it unlatches and comes apart like one of those dinky bff necklaces.”

She’d flipped a series of latches and tugged at one end while Clarke grabbed the other. The sign had come apart with minimal screeching, and Raven gave a Vana-esque flourish and _tada_ as their hosts gaped.

“Clarke’s idea.”

“What can I say?” Clarke shrugged. “I’m an expert at things coming apart.”

Raven’s sharp laugh made any awkward pause impossible and Monty had thrown himself against Clarke, wrapping her in a sloppy hug, Harper piling on top of him.

Monroe had studied the two pieces of the sign for a moment before abruptly bursting into laughter.

“Miller’s a big ho,” they’d cackled, high-fiving Raven.

“Gay me” Miller shot back, deadpan.

Someone bumps into Clarke, refocusing her in the moment. Raven slings an arm around her shoulder and plants a sloppy kiss on her cheek.

“Hey, thousand yard stare,” she says, her breath warm and laced with the yeasty smell of her beer wafting across Clarke’s face. “How’re you doing?”

Clarke smiles and leans her head against Raven’s. “I’m good.”

“You need another water to savage or does that one still have some life in it?” Raven asks, nodding at the water bottle Clarke’s clutching, the label shredded and clinging to the plastic by the last bits of adhesive. “You know that’s supposed to be a sign of sexual frustration, right? What’s Niylah up to?” She bumps her hip suggestively against Clarke’s. “Call her up and get her over here.”

Clarke laughs, ripping the label all the way off and balling it up. “Nah, we’re not doing that anymore.”

“What happened?” Raven swings around to face her, her eyebrows creasing with concern. “You okay? Need me to rough her up?”

Clarke smiles wider, equal parts amused at the idea of Niylah doing anything to hurt anybody and simultaneously touched by Raven’s concern. Sometimes, most times, she can’t believe how lucky she is to have come out the other side with any of her old friends left at all. “It's all good. We were always casual and she met someone, so we called it off.”

“Well, shit. That’s okay; there’s a whole wide world out there.” Raven snags Clarke’s phone out of her back pocket and taps in the unlock code Clarke’s been using for years. “We’ll get you set up.”

“No, Raven, seriously, it’s okay,” Clarke laughs. She grabs for her phone but Raven dances back out of her reach, tipsy and stumbling a little, the metal brace on her leg cracking against the coffee table behind her.

“Clarke,” Raven frowns, scrolling through Clarke’s apps. “Where’s your tinder?”

“I don’t have it,” Clarke says, making another grab but Raven holds it above her head, still scrolling.

“That’s okay weirdo; we can fix that too. What’s your app store password?”

“No, Raven, seriously. I’m good.” Clarke can feel the threads of anxiety she’d nearly locked down creeping through her chest.

“Why not?” Raven asks, still focused on Clarke’s phone, not noticing her rising distress.

“Because dating apps suck for bi people,” Clarke snaps, finally snatching her phone back. “If I want a threesome all I have to do is stand on a corner and shout ‘I’m bisexual!’ Besides, what’s my profile going to say? ‘Former junkie looking for love’? Great selling point.”

Clarke’s tone finally registers. Raven’s face softens and she hands the phone back. “Shit, babe, I’m sorry. I didn’t-“

“It’s cool, I know you didn’t,” Clarke says, not looking at her as she locks her phone and tucks it away.

“Hey.” Raven’s voice is soft, insistent, and when Clarke meets her eyes, they’re warm and concerned. “That’s bullshit. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”

Clarke’s lips twitch with the faintest of smiles. “I know, and I’m not ashamed of it, it’s just not what I want to lead with, you know? But putting myself out there without the disclaimer feels like a lie.”

She sighs. “I’m sorry, too heavy. We’re here to have fun. I’m just….nervous.”

Raven’s answering nod is a little too understanding considering Clarke’s flatly refused to talk to her about this particular topic in any detail since Raven had moved back from California. “We can bounce if you want to, just say the word. But unless you want to recommit to the crusty hermit hipster lifestyle I dragged you out of; you know you’re going to have to face him at some point. Now that he’s finished his MSW, he’s going to start coming out again. Might as well rip the band-aid off.”

The band-aid, right. More like a calcified plaster cast over a gaping chest wound that seems like it hasn’t healed at all in six years.

No, it’s worse than that, because not only is the gaping chest wound entirely her own fault, she hadn’t been the only one at the ground zero of her explosion. Of all the terrible, shameful things she’s done, what she’d done to him—of all people—is the thing that still keeps her up at night as the relentless shame and self-loathing crashes over her.

The fact that she’d doubled down and hid from him for six fucking years is just the shitty cherry on the shitty sunday. Knowing that the least she could do is finally face him was the thing that got her out the door tonight. But now that she’s here, now that the panic is back and clawing its way up her throat, choking her, smothering her, she’s so close to cutting and running— _again_ ; her traitor brain reminds her—her hands shake.

She can’t imagine how bad it would be if Lexa had lived and she’d had to face her too. Then again, if Lexa’d lived, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten so bad.

_Are you seriously blaming your dead ex-girlfriend for your rock bottom? That’s low, Griffin._

Clarke recoils from the thought, disgusted with herself. She knows she didn’t mean it, knows it isn’t even true. That kind thing is just her brain playing tricks on her, trying to make her choices someone else’s fault, but god, she hates herself for thinking it.

Raven’s dark eyes bore into hers and all at once everything’s too much: the sounds, the lights, the music, the people. The concern she was grateful for seconds ago is now an itch she can’t scratch, nails down a blackboard in her brain and she has to get away. She lurches up, nearly knocking over Raven in her sudden panic.

“Hey, Clarke,” Raven steadies her, concern morphing into full-on worry. “Clarke? Do you need to go?”

“Yeah, I’m-” Clarke glances frantically around the room, latching on to the open window and fire escape outside of it. “I need some air.”

She stumbles away from Raven, shoving her way through the crowd as black spots dance around the edges of her vision.

“Clarke-”

“I’m fine!” She shouts over her shoulder, not bothering to look back and see if Raven bought it.

Tripping over a coat lying abandoned on the floor, she nearly falls through the window. Splinters from the peeling frame dig into the palms of her hands as she catches herself and climbs through.

Outside, she hauls herself up on the rickety bars and tilts her head back, closing her eyes and breathing deep. The clumpy, aching thing in her chest relaxes it’s death grip on her heart just enough that her head starts to clear and the static under her skin dials down a notch.

She takes another breath, holding the cool air in her lungs. It’s still cold at night this early in May but she can taste the promise of spring on the horizon. She’s a New Yorker through and through but seven and a half months in the middle of nowhere North Carolina had taught her a thing or two about the pure, steadying pleasure of just breathing fresh air. She exhales slowly, imagining the fear, and pain, and darkness pouring out of her as her lungs empty. One of these days visualization therapy might actually work for her.

She turns to see Raven still watching and gives her a thumbs up and shaky smile before grabbing hold of the stairs and heading up towards the roof.

A sweet, seductive cloud of pot smoke hits Clarke in the face when she climbs over the top of the ladder.

“Shit, sorry, I- oh, hey Clarke.” Murphy waves the smoke away and offers her a hand over the wall surrounding the roof’s edge.

Clarke and Murphy had grudgingly cobbled together an uncategorizable relationship over the years. She’d hated him so much in the beginning when Bellamy used to bring him around to the dorms; she’d carved divots into her palms with her nails trying to hold herself back on more than one occasion. Four years, one broken nose (his), two jammed fingers (hers) and a midnight trip to the emergency room had mellowed that hatred to prickly tolerance and eventually a weird, reluctant almost friendship that neither of them would admit existed.

These days, she appreciates Murphy’s sarcasm and belligerent honesty more than she can say. Clarke loves her friends and she’s glad she has a second chance with them but sometimes the hesitation and sideways glances when they think she isn’t looking make her want to scream. With Murphy, she never has to wonder what he’s thinking because he’ll just come out and say it.

“You want to hit this?” he asks, offering her the joint. “Oh wait, guess you can’t, huh?”

Case in point.

Clarke eyes it and allows herself one long moment imagining what it would be like: the piney, rich smoke filling her throat; floating along a lazy high; her anxiety fogging over and being shelved to deal with later—unless, of course, it’s one of the times the anxiety takes over and she ends up scrambling to find something else, something more, to make it stop.

“I’m good, thanks.”

He shrugs and hits it again, pausing mid-inhale and eyeing her. “Is this okay?” he asks, slightly strangled from trying to hold the smoke inside.

“Yeah, you’re fine.”

He coughs and exhales, blowing it away from her. She appreciates the effort for all the good it does. She’s been clean for six years, sober for five and stayed that way through harder nights than anything the smell of weed could conjure up.

She drops down and leans back against the wall, the cold seeping through her pants making her tailbone ache almost immediately. She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky. The faintest wisps of clouds twine together against the dark sky and she stretches a hand up, tracing their edges. She dots stars like freckles across them, imagining where they would be if she weren’t in the city. Her breath is just barely visible, tiny puffs of gossamer white completing the picture.

Murphy continues to smoke, contemplating the skyline, a companionable silence resting comfortably between them.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asks, rolling her head across the rough bricks to look up at him.

He shrugs, smiles. “Probably picking the pockets of anyone dumb enough to leave their coat unattended.”

Clarke laughs. From what Raven’s told her that might’ve been true when Murphy first started bringing Emori around but not any more—or at least not at her friends’ party.

He carefully stubs out the joint on the bottom of his shoe and clears it before pulling out a pack of cigarettes and sliding it into the cellophane.

“I’m gonna go back down there.” He pauses, scratching behind his ear and studiously not looking at her. “You, uh- You doing okay? With, you know, tonight?”

Clarke picks a shred of rubber off the sole of her shoe, rolling it around in a ball between her fingers, unrolling it. “Yeah. I mean, you know. It had to happen eventually, right?”

“Guess so.”

She tears off another shred, ripping a small hole in the seam. She needed new ones anyway; soles don’t last long in the city.

“Hey Murphy, can I bum a cigarette?”

He pauses, about to climb over the edge, and fishes them out of his pocket, tossing one to her along with a lighter. “Keep it.”

“Thanks.” She tucks it behind her ear— _just in case_ —and shoves the lighter in her pocket.

He salutes before climbing down and then she’s alone.

She used to be good at parties, love parties. It used to be that parties were full of noises and bodies and alcohol and drugs. All the things she could throw herself into to forget that in the morning she’d still be a poor little rich girl with a dead dad, a mom she didn’t know how to talk to and a body count including one best friend and one ex-boyfriend. At least the body count prevented her from being a complete cliche.

Now parties are full of people she’s still relearning how to talk to after surgically removing them from her life one by one. Pretending like she would’ve eventually let them back in one day even if Raven hadn’t shown up on her doorstep six months ago, fresh from the west coast with a spanky new NYC job offer in her pocket demanding to know what the fuck.

_Fuck it._

Clarke pulls the cigarette out from behind her ear and lights it, inhaling long and slow, reveling in the harsh burn of the smoke in her lungs. She needs something and, on the scale of things she knows will help her get out of her head, an increased chance of lung cancer down the road is, all things considered, the most harmless today.

She can’t even remember the night, not really. She remembers the before: how she was spinning further and further out of control, how she’d started using needles and couldn’t hide it anymore, how Lexa was just the last in a long line of people to leave her. Everyone had left her, everyone except Bellamy until she made him.

The night itself is fragmented flashes cloaked in a thick, mostly impenetrable layer of trauma and narcotics. Flash: the tears hot on her face; Lexa’s blood warm on her hands; the terror burning in her lungs, her head, her heart. Flash: boots thudding against the pavement as she ran; blaring sirens as an ambulance screeched around the corner; the N train clanking down the track towards Queens. Flash: hardwood under her fist as she pounded on Bellamy’s door; worn cotton twisted around her fingers as she clutched his shirt and buried her face in his chest; solid muscle wrapping around her and pulling her inside.

After that the flashes turn to heartbeats, counting down one—

_Bellamy washing the blood from her hands, holding them so gently she can barely feel it like they’re brittle glass_

by—

 _Pulling on her hair and choking on sobs, unable to get out of her head long enough to talk, to breathe. Bellamy frantic, shouting_ what happened? Clarke! Talk to me!

one—

_Cool tile under her legs as she collapsed in the bathroom, the pinch of the needle sliding into her abused flesh and the wave of warmth that followed._

until the only thing left—

_Bellamy’s face, hazy and far away, horror and fear twisting it until it was nearly unrecognizable._

was darkness.

A tear escapes the corner of Clarke’s eye and makes its way over her cheekbone where she angrily dashes it away. She can’t change the past; she can only cope in the present. Crying about it doesn’t help anyone.

She’s read the police reports. She knows Lexa had been shot in the tiny alley next to her apartment in Washington Heights—not that far from here, actually. She knows an anonymous tip had summoned an ambulance to the scene where they’d found a body and a gun. She knows the police had traced the gun to Tristan Thorne, one of Lexa’s friends and a suspected drug dealer. They’d found him dead in his apartment having committed suicide over what they assumed was guilt over killing his friend.

With no witnesses and no other evidence at the scene, they’d closed the case quickly putting it down to a drug deal gone wrong. Nevermind that Lexa had been clean, had been trying to save her girlfriend and get her away from that nightmare, had given her an ultimatum the day before that Clarke had chosen the wrong side of.

In a different case file, Clarke Griffin had been admitted to the Mount Sinai Queens ER having overdosed on heroin after turning up at her best friend’s house incoherent with grief and covered in blood.

Clarke found out afterward that her mother had made a generous donation to the hospital to keep that detail away from the press and out of the hands of the NYPD who had some questions for Lexa Woods’ girlfriend. Abby had made several other strategic donations, including a sizable one to a mayoral reelection campaign, to make sure they stopped trying to ask them.

She still felt guilty about that, for all the good it did. The case was closed, no killer left at large. Lexa was an only child of only children; her parents had died several years before—something they’d bonded over, in the beginning—there was no family left to wonder what her last moments had been like (confusion, shock, pain, fear).

On the list of things Clarke felt guilty about, it almost but not quite made the top. That spot belonged to Bellamy. He’d stuck with her as she’d spiraled further and further down, resisting all of her attempts to shake him—not that she’d ever really tried. She’d known she was poison and told herself over and over if there was any part of her that was still a good person she’d keep him clear, but he kept being the one person she couldn’t bring herself to give up.

Until she’d locked herself in his bathroom and ODed on his floor.

During those first few days in the hospital before Abby had her transferred to a private room at Lenox Hill to keep a closer eye on her—riding the relentless wave of cramping muscles, the aches so deep they were inside her bones, drowning in her own sweat and vomiting until she thought she’d turn herself inside out—she knew Bellamy had tried to see her but she’d told the nurses to keep him away. She was wretched, wrecked inside and out, and beneath all of it, so horribly, terribly ashamed of what she’d put him through. She didn’t want him to see her like that again.

After she’d gotten out, she’d gone straight to North Carolina, to a program designed to keep people off drugs by isolating them in the middle of a national forest. She didn’t have her cell phone or laptop or any way to connect to the outside world but at the airport, she’d managed to slip away just long enough to find the last pay phone in existence. She’d dialed the number she knew by heart with shaking fingers, partially lingering PAWS but mostly mind-numbing terror.

For the first time ever Bellamy hadn’t picked up but she’d told herself that was okay, she was calling from an unknown number, it didn’t mean anything. She’d left him a message, trying to explain, trying to apologize. She knew she’d fucked up, knew she’d been fucked up and this was just the inevitable conclusion of the path she’d started down a while ago. She’d told him where she was going and that she wouldn’t be around for awhile. She’d thanked him for being her friend through it all and hung up before she could say anything she’d regret.

Clarke knew that all things had a breaking point and as she boarded the plane, she’d prayed to a god she wasn’t sure she believed in that she hadn’t found that point between them.

The ash from her cigarette drifts down onto her leg. She tries to rub it out but only succeeds in leaving a grey slash across the black denim and isn’t that a perfect metaphor for her life? She knows this train of thought only ends badly and she needs to pull herself out, but it’s less dangerous than other things she could think about on the cusp of seeing Bellamy again.

If she focuses on how much she hurt him, she doesn’t have to remember how much she loved him, and how much of a hole it ripped in the center of her when she let him go.

And that was it, the real reason she’d come out tonight. She could tell herself it was about facing her demons and making amends but really, truly, underneath all of that she just wants to see him again.

_But does he want to see you?_

That was the thing. He’d never called, never tried to get in touch and she’d made herself be okay with that. She’d said everything—nearly everything—there was to say in the message she’d left him. She’d almost called him countless times when she got back to the city but forced herself to leave him be. He had every right to draw a line and all she could do was accept that actions have consequences and these were hers.

But god, _god_ , she _misses_ him.

She misses the stupidest little things. How his smile went just a little crooked when it was really genuine like his face didn’t know how to properly contain the full force of it. How they’d get stoned and watch shitty horror movies in her dorm room and he’d get these uncontrollable giggle fits when things got really pulpy; dropping his head against her shoulder, breathless with laughter, but only if they were alone. How he’d follow her into the ladies room when they were out and she got too drunk, ignoring outraged gasps and scratching her scalp while he held her hair out of the way and she puked, even though he wasn’t all that sober himself and half the time the sound of her gagging would set him off. How his hands were always rough and crackly in the winter because he never wore gloves or remembered to use lotion in spite of the fact that she bought him a pair every year and constantly stashed travel bottles of moisturizer in his coat pockets.

She misses arguing with him over everything and anything the way they had ever since they first met in an art history 101 class. They’d been kicked out for nearly coming to blows over whether or not abstract expressionism was a valid form of art or a bunch of opportunists capitalizing on a lofty vocabulary to sell canvases of colorful splotches. Her whole life people have told her that when she gets worked up, she gets this glint in her eye that means it’s time to back down or be destroyed but Bellamy never had, he’d just bunch up his shoulders and set his jaw and give back as good as he got.

She misses the way he was the first person she’d call—the only person she’d ever willingly call, actually; pretty much everyone else she’d just text—whether because she had news, wanted to do something or just wanted to hear his voice. He had the most amazing voice: deep and low and gravelly, especially when he’d been smoking a lot the night before. She used to love calling him first thing in the morning after they’d been out; the way he’d growl _what the fuck do you want Clarke?_ instead of hello was the best remedy for a hangover she’d ever found. He always, always picked up for her.

She misses him the way she would miss a sense or a body part; she misses him like something that was always a part of her, even though, realistically, she’d only known him for four years compared to the rest of her life. She misses him like something vital she’d never considered what it would be like to be without until suddenly she was.

There were times she used to catch him looking at her and she’d let herself look back for just a moment. The space between them would hum and all of her senses would go on high alert; the world turning to technicolor like looking at him when he was looking back made everything hyperreal.

She’d known there was something between them but she’d always kept it locked away without looking at it too closely. It was too huge, too important and she was too good at disaster to be trusted with something that precious.

It’s not like she’d been wrong.

Abruptly sick of herself, Clarke stubs the cigarette out and shoves herself to her feet. It’s a Saturday night, she’s young and finally getting her shit together and she’s acting like some 93-year-old widow with a lifetime of regret. There’s a celebration two floors below her filled with people she loves and wants to be close to again and here she is, alone on a roof, holding the most epic pity party she’s thrown for herself in ages.

This was a stupid idea; she’s barely acceptable company for herself let alone a mature, collected adult ready to calmly deal with a potentially apocalyptic personal situation. She should’ve tried this on a night that wasn’t about someone else; she’s just setting herself up to ruin things. She might as well try to make some headway on the piece she’s been working on. If she spirals, it’ll just be between herself and her work.

The living room has gotten more crowded while she’s been sulking and she scans the crowd when she ducks back through the window, her nerves once again a jangling symphony of hope and terror, this time with a dash of self-recrimination to spice things up. She sees broad shoulders and dark curls and her heart stops, but it’s just Miller’s ex, Bryan, laughing with her mom’s old intern Jackson over by the rickety folding table dressed up like a bar. It’s funny the way life can go in circles, looping back in on itself and creating new patterns.

Raven’s in the kitchen taking apart a toaster while Monty disassembles a blender. “Robot beer pong” Raven grunts when asked. Clarke feels marginally less terrible about kissing her on the cheek and telling her she’s heading out because clearly Raven’s set for the night.

It takes Clarke a good 20 minutes to make her rounds and say her goodbyes, accepting the sympathetic smiles and hugs on offer. She rescues her coat from the couch, wrestling it out from under Emori where she’s cuddled up with Murphy as the other girl laughs wickedly, holding up her hands to show her palms are empty.

The hallway is disorienting quiet after the noise in the apartment and her footsteps echo off the walls as she tap tap taps down the stairs. She’s digging around in her purse for her MetroCard, debating the pros and cons of dealing with a surge rate or just taking the train while she shoulders her way out the door. Her head’s down and she’s combing through the bottom layer of debris in her purse— _why doesn’t she keep the stupid card tucked in a side pocket like a normal person_ —so she doesn’t see the person lurking just outside until she crashes into them. She curses as her bag tumbles out of her arms, frustration making her especially creative, and drops down to gather the scattered mixture of loose change, chewed up pens, crumpled receipts and doodled on napkins that spilled out.

The person she tripped over clears their throat and she glances up, shaking her hair out of her face as she squats on the dirty stoop in the middle of cleaning up her mess and of course, of _fucking course_ , it’s Bellamy.

“Hi.”

 _Excellent recovery_.

He flicks away the cigarette he’d been smoking and crouches down, helping her scoop everything back into her bag.

“I didn’t know you still smoked.”

 _It’s like you’re_ trying _to be inane._

“I don’t.”

The statement hangs there between them as they finish and stand up. Clarke shoves her bag back over her shoulder and fusses with the place where the straps bunch up against her collar to give her hands something to do.

“So-”

“What-”

They start and stop at the same time, darting glances at each other and away.

“Sorry, what were you saying?” She’s in agony. This is stilted and strange and awful; all of the things they’d never been.

“You’re leaving?” He finally looks at her properly, taking her in. Some things she knows are new: the short cropped bob of her hair haloing her face, the leather jacket she’d finally broken down and bought when she couldn’t keep pretending the old peacoat she’d stolen from her dad back in high school was still anything more than loose threads and scraps of fabric. Some things aren’t: the ripped jeans with doodled on knees peeking out, the paint-splattered t-shirt that actually probably used to be his now that she thinks about it.

“Yeah, I was- calling it a night.”

Bellamy sighs and stares off into the distance, rubbing the back of his neck while he does whatever calculation he’s working out in his head.

His hair is longer than the last time she saw him; not by much, just enough that the raggedy end bits of his curls brush the top of his collar. He’s upgraded from hoodies and a beat up bomber jacket to a dark coat that looks nice and new and not like anything she would’ve guessed he’d pick out for himself. His face, his eyes, they’re the same. A little bit older and a little bit more tired but otherwise just like she remembers. She knows she’s staring but she doesn’t care; it’s not like he’s looking at her.

“Get in the truck, Clarke.”

He points with his elbow to the beat up, rusty pick up parked at the curb down the street—further proof he’s magic, who gets a street spot within eyesight of their destination after midnight anywhere on the island of Manhattan? The bumper still sags a little, and she recognizes the sloppy spot welding job barely holding it together because she’d done it herself. She always loved his truck, not just because he’d helped her move around the city with it; though she does have especially fond memories of hanging out his window, howling at and toasting the moon with her flask while desperately hanging on to the loose strap holding down the probably-about-to-be-discarded-during-renovation furniture she’d salvaged from Steinhardt in the middle of the night and hadn’t bothered to tie down properly.

She’d loved it because it was a sanctuary, an escape. They’d taken it upstate to festivals and concerts, road tripped south to the beach; laid out in the bed of it in front of the house in Astoria that had been his grandparents’, then his mom’s, and was now his, and looked at the stars, tracing the constellations and making up their own. She’d given herself a tattoo of her favorite, The Great Triangle, on her ankle. She’d carefully dotted the ink into her skin with a safety pin they’d heated up over a votive candle while Bellamy told terrible jokes—not trying to shake her concentration, he swore, just keep her entertained—and dumping a bottle of tequila over it when she was done for sterilization purposes.

He’d stocked the mini fridge ice box in her dorm room full of Ben & Jerry’s as an apology when she’d finally sent him enough googled articles and forum threads to convince him that yes Bellamy, that really had burned like all hell, she wasn’t just being dramatic thank you very much.

The truck is also a small, enclosed space with no buffer and Bellamy’s doing that shut down thing with his face that she’s always hated because she hates not being able to read him.

“No, really, it’s fine. You should go in; I know everyone’s looking forward to seeing you.

“You’re still in that place on Dikeman, right?” He asks, ignoring her urging.

“Yeah, so?” She’s so wrong-footed with all of this it takes her a minute to realize he asks that like he’s been at least vaguely keeping track of her.

“So, it’s nearly an hour to Jay Street with the trains this time of night and then, unless you’ve gotten over your bizarre opposition to the bus, you’re going to hike across a deserted part of Brooklyn in the middle of the night.”

“It’s _Red Hook_ ; they say it’s going to be the new Williamsburg any day now. We have an Ikea for fuck’s sake. I’ll be fine.”

“Sure, because white hipsters don’t have crime. Didn’t your people invent serial killers?”

“ _My_ people? Bite your tongue; I’m not from Wisconsin.”

That surprises a laugh out of him, and he shakes his head, starting down the street like it was a foregone conclusion she’ll follow and damn him for being right. “Just get in the truck, Clarke.”

She trails after him like he knew she would and climbs in when he leans across and pops the lock. The hinges still squeal when she pulls the door shut and she still has to slam it to get the latch to catch. The worn, patched seat still cradles her back like she’s been sitting in it this whole time and the floor is still littered with crumpled napkins and empty coffee cups. The air is still thick with the scents of old coffee and oil and that fancy shampoo Octavia apparently still buys for him that makes him smell like a nighttime forest. Everything is so overwhelmingly, comfortingly the same, for a terrifying second she thinks she’s going to cry.

But when he starts the engine—it still stutters a few times before turning over—he doesn’t turn on the radio like a challenge; daring her to find the worst station she can and blast it.

She picks at her nails as he pulls away from the curb, turning the frown into a full on grimace, and chews on a cuticle. She sneaks a glance at him, but he’s staring straight ahead, concentrating harder on the road than the nearly empty streets necessarily require.

She wiggles a bit, the seat creaking, and kicks at some of the trash at her feet out of sheer desperation for something to do.

“Sorry, I haven’t- I’ve been meaning to clean it out.”

“No!” Her pent up anxiety makes the denial disproportionately loud compared to the loaded silence that filled the truck.

_Dial it back, Griffin._

“No, it’s fine, sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb your shrine to lattes gone by.” It’s an old joke, but it falls flat, landing with a thud in the distance between them.

When they reach Tribeca, he starts to cut east, which makes no sense because who wants to drive across lower Manhattan if they have any other option? She wonders if he remembers how much she loves the bridges or if he just wants to avoid a toll from the tunnel.

They cross the Brooklyn Bridge in silence, and Clarke leans her head against the window. She follows the cables all the way up to the tops of the towers and imagines, as she always does, that she could sit up there; not for any particular reason, she just likes to think it would be peaceful. She’d have a hell of a view.

Traffic slams to a halt getting off the bridge right around the time Clarke can’t take this awful, weighted silence anymore.

“How’s-” Her voice is rusty, so she clears her throat and tries again. “How’s Octavia?”

Bellamy smiles huge and proud and crooked, just a flash and it’s gone. Not even all of the things unsaid between them can smother his love for his sister. “She’s good.”

He stops, and her heart sinks, she was so sure that would open him up.

“Do you, uh, you remember that guy she was dating, Lincoln?” He glances at her, and she nods. “They’re still together. They moved up to Poughkeepsie two years ago.”

“Wow.” She’d never expected Octavia to leave the city. Both because New York and Octavia had always seemed like they were made for each other and also because she’d never thought Octavia would go while Bellamy was still here. At the very least she would’ve expected Bellamy to follow.

“Yeah.”

“How’re you-” She bites her lip, unsure if it’s the right thing to say. “I didn’t think she’d leave.”

He smiles again, a rueful quirk of his lip like he knows what she almost said. “It was...a surprise. She’s happy, though. They opened up a dance and martial arts studio. He teaches Capoeira and she does modern dance and Judo.”

Clarke laughs. “That’s very Octavia.”

Octavia had always been a contradiction of kinetic energies. Lithe and graceful, she’d taken the dance program by storm back when they were all in school together and then liked to go out and pick bar fights in her spare time. She’d always been moving to a beat in her head, spinning everyone around her into her orbit through sheer willpower. She’d had her own set of issues and built in aggression and Clarke’s pretty sure that was one of the reasons they’d never totally clicked; they were too volatile together. That and the fact that Octavia always got fiercely territorial over Bellamy—nearly as territorial as Bellamy would get over her.

“I know, right?” He’s grinning when he looks over at her, and for a second it’s any one of a thousand nights from back then. But then the smile slides of his face as he remembers it’s now and her heart aches at the loss of it.

This time the silence lasts until they pull up in front of her studio. Bellamy pulls into the loading zone in front of the locked down commercial sized garage door they usually keep open and use as the entrance when the weather’s good for it.

He hesitates before sitting back, leaving the engine running and not looking at her.

In an instant, she sees how this could go: she could thank him and say good night, slide from the truck and go inside. He’s seen her home safely and unmurdered so he’d let her go. The next time they saw each other, they’d be polite; a bit strained but functional enough that it wouldn’t make things horribly awkward. Theoretically, she could drift forever around the edges of his orbit and never have to do the hard thing and talk to him about what happened. They could be distant acquaintances who used to be friends and that would be the end of it.

That sounds like absolute fucking hell, so she asks him if he wants to come in.

“I, uh-” He glances at her, then the building as if it’s going to tell him what to do.

“It’s pretty different from the last time you saw it.”

“Uh, sure, yeah.” He shuts off the truck and gets out and her stomach swoops—too late to take it back now. “I’d like that.”

 

***

 

She takes him in through the shop door off to the side. They fumble down the dark hallway past the glass-fronted windows displaying various pieces and goods provided by tenants when they remember they need money for things like food and rent and supplies.

“There are hooks there along the wall for your coat. Paint free, I promise. We try to keep the front presentable. Once you get further in, all bets are off.” she says, dropping her jacket and bag on the nearest surface as she shuffles towards the front breaker box; cursing herself for not having gotten around to installing light switches. It’s just that they so rarely use the proper door; there never seemed like much of a point. “It’s a nice coat, by the way.”

“Thanks, Octavia got it for me.” _Ha_ , she knew it.

She starts flipping breakers and feels the warm glow that comes from pride and accomplishment kindle in her chest when Bellamy comes up beside her with a soft _whoa_ as the lights turn on one by one and he gets his first good look at the space.

She’s really, _really_ proud of what she’s done with it.

The summer between Clarke’s junior and senior years of college, Abby caught wind of Clarke’s substance abuse; not the whole of it—it hadn’t gotten really bad yet—but enough to know that Clarke wasn’t making great choices. She’d attempted to snap Clarke out of it by cutting her off and kicking her out. She knew Clarke had received access to the trust fund her grandparents set up for her and the inheritance from her dad when she’d turned 21, so it’s not like Abby was trying to fuck her over. She’d probably hoped the shock of having her mother turn her away would snap Clarke out of it, but she’d failed to realize her daughter was as stubborn as she was.

Instead, Clarke had turned around and taken out a ten-year lease on a warehouse in Brooklyn. Sometimes, when Clarke’s not feeling especially charitable, she suspects the real reason Abby got so mad was that Clarke thwarted her, but she knows that isn’t actually true and she’s just being a brat.

She’d love to say she’d at least put some thought into leasing the place before dropping an astronomical sum on it, but the truth is it’d been big, empty, and put a river between her and her mother, so she’d signed on the dotted line as soon as she could get down to the leasing company’s office.

When she’d first gotten a look at it, it had been a cavernous, empty warehouse. A bulk of it was the main room with a walled-off office and control room above it on one side connected to a balcony along the other by a catwalk that looked like a medium strength gust of wind could blow it down. What was basically a dilapidated lean-to in the corner next to the loading door shielded a single grimy toilet and sink from the rest of the room. There was something the listing optimistically to the point of dishonesty called a greenhouse on the roof, and two large rooms off the back, one of which containing the skeletal remains of an industrial kitchen—including a giant, busted freezer Clarke was pretty sure had held a body or two in its heyday—and that was it.

She’d loved the warehouse for the freedom it represented. Sure, there’d been a downright alarming amount of animal carcasses mixed in along the garbage that had built up while the space stood empty, but it was hers. No one could stop her from testing the acoustics by yodeling—badly—and marveling at the way her voice echoed off of the two-story ceiling. She could make dust angels in the few sunbeams that managed to eek their way in through the grime built up on the skylights scattered across the roof. She could throw parties, raves. She could do whatever she wanted; the space was hers.

That space is very different from the one they’re standing in now.

The skylights are still there, but they’re cleaned up and look down on the shop packed with long, sturdy, wooden work benches and machinery. In addition to two kilns, they’ve got seven kinds of commercial-grade saw, something Clarke’s weirdly proud of considering woodworking is way more Roan’s area than hers. They’d turned the office into a storefront, and the control room is now the office. The catwalk has miraculously survived, but it’s been reinforced and strung with loops of cafe lights. The balcony it crosses to has been partitioned off into individual studio spaces, their shop-facing walls dotted with scavenged windows that let in the light and can be opened when the inhabitants are feeling sociable or shut tight when they’re trying to concentrate. Clarke had installed window boxes along some of them that Nilyah had filled with petunias and geraniums.

Shelves and cubbies and flat files line one of the walls along the main floor, stuffed with scraps of different materials and in progress work. They’d built more studio spaces under the balcony, and the bathroom now boasts sturdy plaster walls and an actual functioning door, in addition to appliances made in this decade. They’d built out the area on top of it and squeezed in a teeny lounge area with a narrow set of stairs connecting it to the ground floor and another walkway they’d constructed connecting to the balcony.

It took four solid years of unbelievably hard work along with buckets of literal blood, sweat and tears as well as the acquisition of one surly, bohemian business partner, but she’d actually managed to build something of worth for the first time in a very long time.

“This is incredible.” When he looks at her, he’s grinning, awed and dazzling and her heart leaps. “Seriously, Clarke, this is amazing.”

“Thank you.” His reaction makes her shy. “We, uh. We rent out half of the private studio space as well as general workspace and storage on the shop floor. We use the downstairs spaces for classes; a couple of the tenants teach in exchange for discounted rent. We do a lot of, um-” She ducks her head and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Roan and I- my business partner, we, um. We met in the program- he was my sponsor, actually. So, we- it was important to both of us to stay involved in the community and give back, so we do a lot of classes for kids with, you know, issues of some kind or another. We also have apprenticeship programs and hire kids to run the store. Well, teens. Anyone over 16. The insurance is enough of a nightmare without bringing actual kids in.”

“I’ve heard of you.”

“Yeah?” She looks over and he’s staring around, jaw slightly slack. He turns and runs his hand along the polished wood treads on the spiral staircase going up to the office. She’d never ended up putting a railing on it and Niylah’s piled the steps with little pots of philodendron and ivy and jasmine that spill over and climb up and down the stairs.

“Yeah, a guy in my program was talking about you a couple of weeks ago. The art therapy place in Brooklyn. I was going to look you up, but I never got around to asking him what you were called.”

“Ah-” She licks her lips. “Triangle. We’re- I- I named it Triangle Studios.”

He meets her eyes for a long, weighted moment, his gaze dark and inscrutable. She feels the hair on the back of her neck lift a bit in recognition and anticipation. _Now? Do we do this now? Can we get it over with? Can’t we just skip to the part where we’re past it?_

“So, um. What have you been up to?”

He makes a face like _really?_ He knows what she’s doing—they’ve always been able to read each other like books written in a language unique to them—but he lets it slide, and even though she feels a shameful amount of relief that the moment’s passed, she’s so unbelievably fucking sad that they’ve been reduced to small talk.

“I’ve uh, I’ve been working for CCI- the Center for Court Innovation? It’s a partnership between the city and community working to reduce system injustice.”

“That’s amazing, Bellamy.”

“Yeah, it’s...it can be a really great organization and they’re doing important work but a woman I worked with there, Indra? You might remember me talking about her. She took O under her wing back in high school when she was getting in all of those fights.”

“She was the one who used to send you those Christmas cards where her daughter made her put on an ugly sweater and pose with a mall Santa, right?” Clarke giggles, remembering. “She always looks so pissed.”

“Yeah, that’s Indra. She still sends out those cards. She pretends to hate it but she’s full of shit; no one makes her do anything she doesn’t want to do. But, uh, she got me the job and it’s been great, but there isn’t a ton of room for advancement so I’ve been working on my MSW and keeping an eye on my options.”

“I heard. Congratulations, by the way.” It’s so stupid that she feels like she has no right to congratulate him. ”A MSW from Columbia is pretty huge”

He shrugs it off but she catches the tiniest sliver of his smile when he ducks his head. “Anyway, Indra left CCI a little while ago and is working on getting a community center up and running in Ridgewood. She just offered me a director position in charge of the youth programming, so I’m probably going to give that a shot.”

“Bellamy!” He says it so casually, like that’s not an amazing accomplishment and she wants to shake him. He’s never been good at focusing on his wins, always paid more attention to his fuck ups. They’ve always had that in common.

“That’s such a perfect opportunity for you.” He’s always had a soft spot for kids; a side effect of more or less raising Octavia while their mom worked three jobs to pay off the last of the mortgage and make sure their home belonged entirely to them.

She’s so proud of him her chest aches, and then aches again in a different way that she has no room to feel that way; it’s not like she had anything to do with it.

She’s beaming at him and he shuffles a bit, clearly not knowing how to deal with it.

“Yeah, well. The pay is shit, I’ll be in debt for the rest of my life, but I like it.” He looks away, tucking his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels a bit. “What do you guys make here?”

She lets him change the subject since he’d graciously let her off the hook before. “All sorts of stuff. There’s a candle maker upstairs and a leatherworker. We’ve got a lot of woodworkers; there was a girl who just left that was making canoes. There’s a pottery studio, so ceramics people are regularly in and out, and we’re working on getting a glass furnace. We’ve got a landscape designer who runs the rooftop garden. There are a lot of people who chip in for general space just to hang out and do their thing. Oh! There’s a girl that makes knives; she’s cool. Kind of scary.”

He laughs a little. “That sounds like a girl I used to date.”

“Was her name Echo? Because-” He starts at the name. “Oh my god.”

“I- huh. It was almost a year ago.”

“She’s only been here about six months.” Clarke doesn’t know if she should laugh or cry that they’d been so close to crossing paths. “Oh my god, you’re the guy with the hands.”

“The what?”

“You know how she doesn’t like to refer to her exes by name? I’m pretty sure you’re the guy with the hands.”

“The hands?” He looks like he’s been hit upside the head, so she forgives him for being a little slow to catch on.

“Yeah, you know.” She wiggles her fingers suggestively. “You’re good with your hands?”

“Oh.” He smirks. “Well, yeah.”

Clarke smirks back. “Don’t get too cocky; she said I might be better.”

Bellamy’s startled for a split second before flashing that crooked grin. “Is that a challenge?

They smile at each other, and his dimple pops out and she feels the faintest edge of that old charge in the air. But then the tension sours, and fuck it, she’s doing this now because if she doesn’t she’ll lose her nerve and if it all goes horribly wrong at least that’ll be a new kind of torment.

“Do you want a drink? We’ve got, um, probably beer? Maybe wine? I’m not really sure.”

“I, uh-”  He frowns at her abrupt, rapid-fire questions.

“I’ve also got orange juice? Water? Whatever you want. Well, of those limited options. Some of which we might not have.”

“I’m good-”

“Do you want to sit?” She pulls out a stool from the nearest workbench and straddles it. Understanding dawns and all of the animation in his face locks down as he tenses. He slowly grabs one from the table next to hers, spinning it around, so when he sits he’s facing her.

“We’re doing this now?”

“I mean, we can keep dancing around it and enjoy the awkward silences, but I’d rather just, you know, rip the band-aid off.”

“By all means, the floor is yours,” Bellamy says with a wave of his hand.

Clarke takes a deep breath, twisting her fingers together in front of her until the skin goes white. Here goes.

“Let me just start with I’m sorry. I was a slow-motion trainwreck for a long time, and I knew it and kept dragging you with me anyway. That last night was the worst, most dramatic example but I’d been heading in that direction for a long time, and you had a front row seat, and I’m sorry for putting you through all of that.”

She glances up at him to see how he’s taking it, but his face is a blank mask, the muscle in his jaw twitching like a tiny pulse. She plunges onward.

“I had a lot of stuff I wasn’t dealing with, didn’t know how to deal with and I used you just as much as the drugs to not deal with any of it, and that was completely unacceptable.”

Still nothing.

“I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself these past few years; not just on the sobriety stuff but the rest- the in my head stuff. I’m in a better place; I’m learning how to cope. I haven’t touched drugs since that night, and I haven’t had a drink in five years.”

She needs him to do something, _anything_. “Drinking, it...it makes too many bad ideas seem like good ones,” she offers.

He still isn’t saying anything, and she can’t read him, god she _hates_ that she can’t read him and he knows it, too. Suddenly she’s angry. It comes on like a storm, and the rest of her carefully prepared speech unravels, and the words come bubbling up from the dark, bitter part of herself she’s tried so hard to deny.

“And I get that you were done. I understand that; it was only fair that you drew a line in the sand and I’ve respected it, made myself respect it.” Her breath hitches and she knows it’s not the time for what’s coming, this should be about amends, but she can’t help it. If she doesn’t get this all out now, she never will and she’ll regret it forever. “But, _god_ , Bellamy. It was so hard and you never- you never called. Not once. I’m so sorry I hurt you, sorrier than I can ever put into words or make up for, but you hurt me too.”

The silence between them stretches out and hangs there; a dead animal left out to drain after slaughter. She knows it’s all in her head but for a crazy second, she thinks she can hear the last of the blood drip, drip, dripping away onto the concrete floor.

“You done?” His voice is flat, hard. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, so she just nods.

“That was a great speech, Clarke. Really. I can tell you’ve worked on it.”

Bellamy’s doing the weaponized, nonchalant sarcasm thing she’s seen him use on other people but has never, ever been the target of since they’d become friends and it cuts like a razor.

“You’re getting a few things wrong, though.” He says it so casually, like they’re talking about the weather, like this doesn’t _matter_ , that for a split second she hates him, she really does. He knows exactly what he’s doing and it’s cruel. He’s never been cruel to her before.

“I always knew who you were. Your slow-motion trainwreck? It wasn’t exactly subtle. I knew what I was in for and I was okay with that because it was _you_ and I-” Bellamy stops abruptly, regroups. “I made my own choices, and I don’t regret any of them. You never have to apologize to me for what you were going through or who you were- are; I signed up with my eyes open.” He takes a jagged breath.

“I thought you were fucking _dead_ , Clarke.” She winces, the unexpected force of his anguish washes away her fury like it was never there at all. His voice shakes with the effort of holding the emotion back but it leaks out around the edges, a rough, thick stew of hurt and no small amount of anger.

“You- I- While I was waiting for the ambulance, you stopped breathing, and I couldn’t find your pulse. I was trying to remember how to do CPR but I couldn’t, and I had no idea if I was doing it right, and I was so _sure_ you were gone, and I was going to break your ribs for no reason.”

“Bellamy-“

“No, you had your turn. Just- let me say this.”

He drags his hands through his hair before letting them drop on exhale. He stares down at them dangling helplessly between his legs and his throat bobs as he swallows.

“When I went to the hospital, and they wouldn’t let me in, I thought maybe, I don’t know, that it was your mom or something; that there was someone keeping you from me, someone I could fight. I asked- I _begged_ them to let me see you. I told them I had to; I told them you’d want to see me.

“They told me-“ He swallows again. “They told me that _you_ had asked- that you’d told them not to let me in.”

He looks at her now, the lines of his face stark; he looks like he’s aged a thousand years.

“You died. On my floor, in my arms. It was just for a few seconds, and you came back, but you _died_ , Clarke.”

She’s in free-fall. She’s played this conversation out a thousand times in her head and feels so fucking stupid that somehow this version hadn’t occurred to her and oh _god_ , he’s not done.

“And then you wouldn’t let me see you.” His voice breaks on the last word and her heart goes right along with it. “You died, and then I couldn’t see you because you didn’t want me, you wouldn’t let me just- just see with my own eyes that you were okay, to _know._ ”

She’s crying now, silent tears rolling down her cheeks and his eyes are liquid with misery and incomprehension. “I would’ve left you alone, Clarke. If that’s what you wanted, I would’ve left. I just wanted to see you.”

“I’m _sorry._ ” It bursts from her on a sob. “I didn’t- I couldn’t, I didn’t know you were-”

His brow furrows, and she holds up a hand, warding him off before he says anything. “I was so horrible, Bellamy; then, before- You can say you didn’t care and okay, you didn’t. I believe you. But I was _so_ fucked up and I’d made you deal with _so many_ of my messes because I didn’t want to do it alone. You saved me over and over and over by just being there, and I wanted to save you for once.

“I’m not trying to make excuses; I fucked up. Hard. But you can’t- You have to know it wasn’t because I didn’t want you there. Doing that- getting clean and putting myself back together without you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

She stops. What else is there to say? The oxygen has left the room, and she’s suffocating in vacuum; balancing on the knife’s edge between hope and despair; waiting to see if they’re broken or if they can fix this.

He stares at her for a long moment then sighs, reaching across the space between them to take her hand, wiggling and twisting his fingers between hers. “I’m sorry, too. I should’ve called. After awhile I didn’t even know why I wasn’t. I thought- I told myself a lot of stuff. It was shitty and stupid and I’m sorry.”

His mouth twitches with something that’s almost a smile. “I was really fucking pissed at you.”

Her answering noise is more of a wet snuffle than a laugh, but it doesn’t matter because she’s so fucking grateful to be holding his hand, she’s dizzy with it. She squeezes hard, clinging tightly.

Just like that, it’s over. Six years of agony and anticipation wiped away so quickly it almost feels anticlimactic; but that’s always been the way between them: easier than she could ever believe was possible. The tension still hums, but instead of the prickly ozone pressure of an oncoming storm, this feels more like the afterward when the clouds are clearing, and the heavy air starts to lighten.

She holds on for another moment before letting it drop, scrubbing at her face to wipe away the mascara that’s trailed down to her chin. Bellamy visibly relaxes, stretching his legs out in front of him and looking around the studio.

“So, which one of the studios is yours?”

It’s a lifeline cast into a rocky sea, an olive branch offer to move forward instead of continuing to drown in the past and she grabs hold gratefully.

“I’m on the roof. I was living in the office for awhile but Roan and Niylah built me my own space when they were cleaning up the greenhouse.”

“Can I, uh.” He scratches his head, suddenly shy. “If you want to show me, I’d love to see what you’ve been working on. Besides, you know, all of this.”

“All of this isn’t enough for you?” She says it lightly, teasing, but inside she’s singing.

“For anyone else, maybe, but this is slacking for Clarke Griffin.”

“Well.” She smiles. “I guess that’s true.”

 

***

 

She heads towards the back, past one set of barn doors hiding the refurbished kitchen to another set she rolls open, exposing the back room they’ve set up like a conference space. A huge wooden table takes up most of the room. It’s handmade, naturally, with clusters of Edison bulbs dangling above it on long dark wires from the same 25-foot ceilings as the shop like a weird, almost coincidental chandelier. A vertical garden stretches up most of the back wall, the verdant panel of fern and mint and verbena brighten up the otherwise stark, minimalist space. Clarke swerves around the table, beelining towards another spiral staircase in the corner that circles around and up to a padlocked trapdoor in the ceiling.

“I’ve gotta say, Clarke,” Bellamy says, following her up the stairs, “this is the most intensely Brooklyn hipster shit I’ve ever seen.”

Her laughter bounces around them off the unfinished concrete walls. “I know. I’d be disgusted with myself if I didn’t love it so much.”

She unlocks the door with the key she wears on a long chain around her neck and climbs up, welcoming Bellamy into her sanctuary.

When she’d leased the warehouse, the structure was something like the ghost of a lean-to greenhouse—more broken glass and rust than anything else—propped up against the side of a crumbling brick storage space. It connected to the downstairs by a rusty freight elevator and a half rotted exterior staircase along the side of the building. Niylah had a vision for the roof involving an urban farm and garden, and Clarke had told her to have at it, just let her know what kind of a budget she needed and she’d allocate it out of her rapidly dwindling trust fund. She’d had her hands overly full with all of the work downstairs and trusted Niylah to make something magical.

Unbeknownst to Clarke, Niylah and Roan had hatched a plan to carve out a space for Clarke since she’d shown no inclination to do it herself. Niylah built her garden out on the roof and under the cover of the chaos, Roan renovated the existing structure into a neat little three-room apartment annex supplementing the budget with his own stash of Old Money legacy funds. She’d cried like a baby when they brought her up to show her what they’d done.

She tells Bellamy all of this, and he smiles wistfully. “I’m glad you have people who care about you like that.”

“Yeah, they’re- they’re pretty great. I don’t know what I would’ve done without them. Roan always says I’m like the little sister he’s never had, and he’s grateful for how it’s made him appreciate only-childhood.” Bellamy snorts. “Niylah, well. She’s probably the kindest, most nurturing person I’ve ever met. I’ve leaned on her a lot.”

Bellamy glances at her out of the corner of his eye. “Is she your- I mean, do you…um.”

Her heart trips when she realizes what he’s asking. “No, we’re not. We kind of did for a bit, but she’s just a friend,” Clarke says, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

_Calm the fuck down, Griffin. He’s just curious._

Niylah’s gardens butt up against the exterior of Clarke’s nest. She’d planned them so there’d always be something growing, no matter the season. Clematis vines bloom along the outsides of the windows, wrapping around the nearly invisible wires she’d run to help them climb. Lilac trees and hydrangeas sway back and forth at a gentle breeze between tall, tufty smoke bushes, casting long shadows through the windows. The shadowy greenery outside makes the apartment feel like an enclosed, secret garden oasis, full of life and movement.

Inside, the original greenhouse structure has been cleaned up and repaired, the wall between the windows and the rest of the storage space has been knocked down opening up a large, airy room tinted silver with the moonlight pouring in through the floor to ceiling windows. Clarke flicks on the track lights, dispersing the shadows, kicking the trapdoor closed and casting her arms wide.

“Behold, my space.”

The main room is pretty much all studio, cluttered with easels and more flat files and stuffed shelves overflowing with supplies. Rolls of canvas and stretchers lean against the wall, and the cedarwood and moss candles she’s constantly burning haven’t entirely covered up the faint remnants of turpentine that permeate the room. One corner’s devoted to a small kitchen, with a lofted storage space above it that she’d built herself out of two by fours and determination, ignoring Roan’s increasingly dire warnings about building codes and safety standards. Teetering stacks of books line the edge of the platform, and the corner of a worn rug flops over. The door to what would’ve been her bedroom if she didn’t spend most nights sleeping in the sagging, lopsided armchair in her studio stands slightly ajar; a tangled cloud of pillows and blankets just visible inside.

It’s messy and lived in and entirely hers, her safe haven, and she turns around and there’s Bellamy standing in the center of it. Her absolute, most best case scenario for tonight included a tentative truce and _maybe_ the beginnings of a rekindled friendship. Having him here, looking around with eyes bright and curious, a fond smile stealing across his face is so much more than anything she dared hope for. The night's taken on the surrealist, fuzzy edges of a dream and it makes her head spin.

“The best part of moving up here was the bathroom. I hadn’t had a shower of my own in forever; I was making due with a guest pass to Roan’s gym and a camp shower...”

She trails off because Bellamy isn’t listening; he’s crossed the room and is staring at the painting that dominates the space. It’s a grandiose, gigantic affair that takes up most of the back wall. She composed it out of six six-foot-square canvases evenly spaced and gridded together, each panel a puzzle piece of the whole.

Clarke comes up beside him, the intimacy of having him up here making her suddenly—excruciatingly—aware of the inches between them. The fine hairs on her arms stand up, reaching across the space between them, expressing the yearning she can barely admit to herself let alone to him.

A nighttime forest stretches across the painting, rendered in rich, dark greens and blues with deep purple shadows and pale, moonlit highlights. She’d mixed plaster and pigment and layered it across the canvas, building the trees and foliage in three dimensions as well as vivid hyperreal technicolor. Glowing, golden trails of fireflies dance along barely visible iridescent energy lines weaving through the trees and disappearing into the distance along with a mostly hidden path through the woods.

“It’s beautiful,” he murmurs, stretching a reverent hand towards the canvas, snatching it back when he realizes what he’s doing and darting an apologetic glance at her.

“It’s okay; you can touch it. Well, carefully. It’s for a show in two weeks.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “You have to move this? How?”

“The freight elevator and patience, I guess. I wanted to do something...ambitious. Big. The idea is to make people feel like they’re there. The installation’s going to take up the whole room, as close to a 365 view as I could make it.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah, it’s in pieces over there.” She gestures towards a stack of canvases leaned against the wall. He starts over towards them, and she panics a little; she didn’t think this through. “Do you want anything to drink? Sorry, I know I already asked you that.”

“I’m good.” He’s carefully flipping through the canvases and her pulse jumps. Maybe she’s overreacting; he might not-

“These look...familiar.”

 _Fuck_.

“Yeah, I, um. I based a lot of it on some of the places we used to go upstate. Also, the place I was at in North Carolina.” She’s talking too fast, the alien experience of intentionally lying to him making her tongue clumsy. He keeps going, slower now, thoughtfully. “It’s kind of a fantasy mash-up, loose inspiration, you know? Not anywhere in particular, so-”

“Liar.” His soft statement cuts across the tumble of words and he looks up at her. His eyes are dark and unfathomable and root her to the spot. She doesn’t have to look to know which canvas he’s holding.

It’s the epicenter of the whole installation. The trees have cleared to reveal a narrow jut of rock over the bright silver pool of a quarry below. There’s a figure sitting on the edge; their head turned towards the viewer. They’re backlit, so their features aren’t clear beyond the barest hint of highlight in their eyes to make it clear they’re staring straight out, but the broad-shouldered, curly-headed silhouette would be familiar as his own skin to Bellamy.

The fireflies and ley lines that weave through the other panels come together in this one, swirling and twisting and coming to an end with him at the heart. She’s planning to say something philosophical about human connection and empathy for her artist statement, but it’s more than that to her.

She swallows hard, her throat suddenly as dry as the desert. Bellamy’s never- he can’t remember. They’d never talked about it, and she’d convinced herself he’d forgotten, but as he gently leans the canvases back and turns towards her, that certainty wavers.

_After the concert ends, the festival woods come alive. Screeches and howls and laughter and drums echo, echo, echo. Looming ghostly shadows made of trees close in and surround them, golden fires flickering every which way in between. The mushrooms paint the world with neon outlines, and if Clarke looks closely enough, she can see that every molecule is breathing. Her feet are roots, tethering her to the ground and every time that thought makes her heart flutter like a trapped bird, dark eyes made entirely black by the night and the drugs, find hers and she’s free again._

_She runs her fingers across the smooth skin on his face, marveling at the way his freckles sparkle and dance under her fingers._ You’re fairy kissed _she tells him._

_Later, she’s lost, and she doesn’t know how. She runs, the sharp stones and gritty, sandy dirt rough against her bare feet, lodging between her toes but she barely notices. She runs and runs and runs, guided by a tether in her heart pulling her forward and showing her the way. She doesn’t question it, she just runs._

_When she bursts from the woods and the world goes bright with starlight, he’s already looking to her, dark eyes locked on hers like he’d known she was coming._

_The calluses on his fingers rough against her palm as she pulls him to his feet. The tempo of his heart under her hand as he leans in matches the rapid beat of her own. The softness of his mouth as his lips press against hers and the warm slide of his tongue when she opens for him sets her skin alight._

_The hard muscles of his body jump and ripple under her hands as she pushes him down when they get back to their tent, sending a thrill through her from her fingertips down to her toes. The pressure of his thumbs digging into the hollows just above her hip bones as he holds her steady against him sends shockwaves up and down her spine. When she sinks down, and he slides into her for the first time, she feels it so deep it echoes back through time until there was never a time she didn’t know what this feels like. They move against each other, the ragged gasps of their breathing in tandem a symphony, filling their nylon cocoon._

_She sinks into the dark with his arms around her and a barely audible_ I love you _pressed into her hair. Her matched response is a brand against his collarbone, and she falls asleep feeling perfectly content for the first time in longer than she can remember._

His phone had jolted them awake obscenely early the next morning; his face had gone stark with terror as a tired, overworked nurse relayed that an Octavia Blake had been in a car accident. His sister was doing just fine but did he have her insurance information handy? She couldn’t remember the provider.

Clarke had caught the phone when he’d burst into a flurry of motion and relayed the relevant information, assuring the nurse they were on their way, while Bellamy scrambled around in circles, throwing their things haphazardly into the truck.

When the dust settled, after they got back to the city and brought Octavia home, they still hadn’t talked about anything or even acknowledged the night before at all. Bellamy’s focus was entirely on O, shifting back and forth between reasonless panic and berating himself for being three hours away when she needed him. Clarke didn’t bring it up because it was obviously and emphatically not the time.

But when she’d made her way back to the warehouse, reality had thoroughly come crashing back in. She’d looked around the decrepit space she called home and concluded that she was too much of a mess and starting anything between them would only end in tragedy. She’d do whatever it took to protect the best thing she had going for her. Chances are he didn’t remember, anyway. He’d been tripping just as hard as she had, probably more so, actually, because at that point she was pretty far ahead of him on chemical experimentation and her tolerance for most things was sky high. Best case scenario, he’d put it down to an especially vivid dream.

The next time she’d seen him, she’d looked away when he looked at her and let things go back to some kind of normal. Pretty soon after she’d gone to that party with Anya and the next morning the other girl had rolled over and said in her blunt, no-nonsense way: _This was fun. You should meet my friend Lexa._

Throughout it all he’d never said a word about that night.

And now here they are, and he’s looking at her like he remembered it every bit as clearly as she did and she has no idea how to handle it.

Bellamy takes a tentative step towards her. She licks her lips and watches him, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid that anything she does will break the formless something building between them. The tension is a living thing, the tether pulling tight.

“I didn’t think you remembered.” He says it so quietly, she would’ve missed it if her all of her senses weren’t on high alert. The light shimmers across his skin as his muscles tense and ripple.

Her pulse is pounding, and her skin tingles with anticipation. The world is hyperreal technicolor.

She takes a deep breath, and it echoes through the crystalline stillness inside her head.

“I’d never forget.”

The moment stretches out. Her entire nervous system is in redline, and this can’t be good for her blood pressure, but she can’t bring herself to move, too uncertain which direction is the right one.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

She wrinkles her nose, indignant. “Why didn’t _you_ say anything?”

The tension breaks, but not in the way Clarke was expecting. Bellamy bursts out laughing, really laughing; the kind of laughter that shakes his whole body and makes him wheeze. He staggers into her drafting table, clutching it to hold himself up.

“I’m sorry- this isn’t, this is just so-“

He can’t get the words out but she smiles because she knows exactly what he means.

Clarke sags against the table beside him, and he leans on her, giggling like he used to. A sound so happy, and breathless, and just-for-her, that her heart turns over and she ducks her head and kisses him.

The angle is awkward and terrible, and his laughter cuts off abruptly. He freezes against her, and she has just enough time to think _fuck, I’ve made a huge mistake_ before he moves, pulling her around and then everything clicks into place.

His hands come up to cup her face as he angles his mouth against hers and she clutches his shoulders going up on her toes to deepen the kiss. He tastes like old coffee and smoke and the faintest trace of something sweet like strawberries, and she sighs and licks into him, intoxicated.

Their teeth click together as the kiss turns frantic and he groans into her mouth as she bites at his lip. She’s suddenly inescapably aware that she’s kissing _Bellamy_ and the magnitude of going from that black hole loneliness without him to this overwhelms her. She pulls back slightly, resting her forehead against his, their breath mingling together as she tries to find her bearing.

“Clarke.” Her name comes out a rough whisper.

“What are we doing?”

“I don’t know.”

Clarke pulls back further, and his hands fall to her hips, catching her and keeping her from going far before he drops them.

“Should we talk about this?”

His breath comes out in a _whoosh,_ and he shrugs, his tiny smile has a rueful edge to it. “Probably.”

He white-knuckle grips the edge of the table, and she brushes a lock of his hair back from where it’s fallen into his eyes. He meets her eyes for a second and then looks away. She doesn’t know what to say. She wants this, she’s scared of this, it’s all a tangled mess of complicated emotion living in her chest, and she doesn’t know where to begin working through it.

“Hey.” She nudges his foot, and he meets her eyes. His are big and dark and just as conflicted as she feels. “I just want us to be okay, whatever that means.”

“Me too.”

They stare at each other, and they’re right back where they started: looking at each other, feeling the thing between them, neither one of them knowing how to get across it.

She’s so _tired_ of not knowing how to get across it.

She bites her lip, searching for the perfect thing to say, and his gaze drops to her mouth.

“Fuck it.”

She has just enough time to realize they both said it at the same time before they crash back together and she stops thinking.

She curls her fingers around his collar and breathes him in. He smells like cedar and citrus and sage and every time she’s ever felt safe and whole and loved, completely and uncomplicatedly, since she met him.

Her blood turns to fire as she fists her hands in his hair, yanking his mouth hard against hers. She wants, she wants, she _wants_.

His arms come around her shoulders holding her close and his thigh slides between hers, hard and solid. She grinds against it, sparks shooting through her, concentrated explosions at every point of contact. She kisses him like it’s the most important thing she’s ever done; the press of her lips and slide of her tongue saying everything she can’t find words for to tell him how much she missed him, she wants him, she loves him.

He groans into her mouth, and she swallows the sound, feeling it echo down her throat and nest in her heart. He takes her with him as he shoves off against the table,and it screeches as it jerks back, the sound lost in the frantic beat of her pulse in her ears. Their feet tangle together, and they stumble.

“Bedroom, that way.” She flings a hand in what she’s pretty sure is the right general direction, not wanting to break away long enough to check. They stagger through the room, wound around each other, bumping into obstacles until he cups her ass and she jumps up, wrapping her legs around his waist and clinging tight.

They find their way and tumble through the door onto the bed that takes up most of the small, cluttered room. She rolls them over and straddles him, bowing over him and nipping at his jaw. She can feel him hard against her through too many layers of clothing and the so close but not quite-ness of it all makes her whine in the back of her throat.

His fingers slide under the hem of her shirt, somehow hotter than her overheated skin. She sits up, pulling the shirt up and over her head and his hands chase the edge up to her bra, unsnapping it, and she wiggles out—his hips buck, and she thrills at the involuntary jolt—tossing it aside. She starts as the cold metal of her key falls back against her chest and rips it over her head, impatiently hurling it away.

His eyes are dark as he takes her in and when he cups her breasts, she can feel the hint of a tremor in his hands. She runs her own unsteady hand over his chest, splaying her fingers across the muscle, tracing the silvery scar that cuts across his ribs—a relic from a childhood fall from the apple tree planted in his front yard two generations ago —marveling at the way he shivers.

“Clarke.” Her name is soft, reverent, part benediction, part prayer, and the liquid tenderness that rolls over her drowns out the want, so she bends down to kiss him softly, sweetly, just a whisper of her lips against his.

“Hi.”

He smiles against her mouth, and it feels like touching the sun. “Hi.”

He slides a hand into her hair, cupping the back of her head, kissing her deep and slow as her heart skips a beat.

They trade long, lazy kisses back and forth and she thinks she could do this forever. But then Bellamy’s hand on her hip tightens, and he presses against her, and the need comes roaring back like a tidal wave through her veins.

She pulls back with a gasp, and he surges up after her, hooking an arm around her waist, tumbling her around and down. Her head’s still spinning when he pulls down her jeans and underwear, tripping a little as he yanks them off with her shoes.

He stands and kicks off the rest of his clothes. The moonlight beaming in through the window next to the bed turns him to sterling and shadow, and the light from the other room casts a golden halo around him. She slides a hand down to touch herself- _fuck_ she’s wet- memorizing the sight of him.

Then he’s crawling back over her, kissing her once, hard, before sliding down, leaving a trail of fire with his teeth. He kisses her palm, and her whole body tightens when he takes a finger gently between his teeth and licks it clean. He buries his face in the crease at the top of her thigh, and she feels his breath on her clit and thinks she might actually die if he doesn’t touch her _right now_.

She growls as she yanks at his hair and he laughs against her, the vibration making her throb and she wants him to do that again and again and again.

Then he covers her with his mouth, and the first flick of his tongue against her has her arching off the bed with a hoarse shout. She knows he smirks because she can feel it and she’d smack him but if he stops she’ll have to kill him. Apparently Raven was on to something with the sexual frustration stuff because she can’t remember a time she’d felt so wired and overwhelmed at one touch.

It could also be _him_ and the years and years of pent-up want.

He licks into her, and her brain shuts off. He works her with his tongue and his lips and his teeth, alternating between fast and slow, bringing her up but not quite to the edge and she trembles and aches, her breath panting out of her, turning to whimpers. Just when it’s too much and not enough all at once, he slides two fingers into her, finding her g-spot like he has a map and crooking them just right, once, twice, then again and again, and she’s racing towards the peak and flying over it.

When she comes, she splinters into a thousand glittery pieces, erupting like a supernova and when she comes back to herself, he’s there, working her through it and holding her together. She drops her head back and blinks at the ceiling, trying to catch her breath and letting the static clear from her vision. She looks back down, and he’s watching her. She pulses around his fingers still inside her, and if he looks a little smug, she can’t exactly argue that he’s earned it.

The moon glints off of the wetness on his chin, and she jerks as an aftershock rolls through her.

His fingers slide free, and she sits up and cups his face, pulling him to her and licking herself off of his mouth. She reaches down and wraps her fingers around him, and he’s so hard it feels like steel in her hand. She runs her hand along him, gentle and slow, and he drops his head against her shoulder, his breath going ragged.

“Condom?” He rasps out the question, and it takes a minute to register, but when it does it’s like a bucket of icy water dumped over her head.

“ _Fuck._ ” She falls back on the bed with a thud.

She hasn’t hooked up with a guy in- well, awhile, and she rarely brings people up here, so her supplies are non-existent.

“I take it that’s a no.” He flops down beside her, trailing a finger up her side and it’s really not helping, but she doesn’t want him to stop.

“That’s a no.”

They breathe together for a minute, fire banking to embers. There’s a lump in her throat; she knows there are all kinds of ways to have sex and it’s not like he wasn’t just inside her but _fuck_ she wants more so badly she thinks she’s going to cry.

She darts a glance at him, and he looks back at her, waiting to see where she wants to take this. Nerves make her palms tingle, but she wants him, she trusts him, she hopes to god he trusts her.

“I haven’t- um.” She huffs out a breath. “I’m clean. I get tested regularly, the last one was a few weeks ago. I have an implant, and I trust you. I know you have no reason to believe me but-”

“Clarke.”  He links his fingers with hers. “Me too.”

She looks at him, and he kisses her knuckles. Holding back, waiting for her.

“Are you sure?”

“I trust you.”

“Me too.” She tugs at him, and he rolls on top of her, pressing their entwined hands into the bed above her head. His weight is just the right kind of heavy and solid between her legs. He brushes her hair back with his free hand and ducks his head to kiss her, and she reaches down and guides him in.

He slides into her like they were made for this and the stretch and fill of him sets her alight. Her body’s a live wire, his skin the neutral, directing the electricity round and round the circuit. She arcs into him as the current races up her spine.

 

They move together like this is a dance they’ve been doing their whole lives, not just once before in the dead of night. She whispers _more,_ and he shifts her leg higher, snapping his hips into her harder and harder and she grabs hold of the iron bars that make up her headboard, giving herself up to the rhythm.

When his eyes go wild, and strokes get frantic, the sight of him on the edge is enough to send her over. She comes with his name on her lips and just as the white noise explosion sets off inside of her and drowns everything out, she sees his form hers as he lets go.

Afterwards, he rolls off of her with a sigh and she curls into his side, resting a hand on his chest, feeling the frantic beat of his heart thrum under her fingers. He twines his fingers through her hair, absently twisting out the tangles and staring up at nothing, a faintly bewildered expression on his face like he can’t figure out how they got here.

Clarke relates.

The contrast between the stilted silence of earlier and the comfortable quiet between them now is the greatest relief her battered heart could want for but the night feels unfinished in a way she doesn’t know how to address and she can feel something unfurling in her mind, shaking off years of dust and shadow and crawling out into the light.

The realization strikes like a thunderbolt and her world cracks open and realigns itself. She’s been lying to herself. She doesn’t want her old thing with Bellamy back; she wants this thing, the thing they were supposed to have, the thing she was too stupid and scared and fucked up to go for.

She’s suddenly desperately, breathlessly afraid that if she doesn’t do the exact right thing she’ll lose her chance forever.

“So, that bathroom you mentioned…” His voice brings her back, and she forcibly shoves her epiphany away. It’ll be what it’ll be, and she’s not going to ruin what’s left of the night because what if it’s all she has?

“Right, bathroom. Indoor plumbing. Highly luxurious.” She rolls off the bed and rummages around for a shirt. She’s already pulled it on when she realizes it’s another one that used to be his, but if Bellamy notices, he doesn’t mention it, and she doesn’t know if that’s a relief or a disappointment.

“It’s the door off of the kitchen-ish thing.” She watches him pull on his pants and her fingers twitch to paint him; she’d do it in black and white on a dark canvas and bring him out of the shadows in white highlights, dotting in the merest hint of freckles with silver. _Fairy kissed_ she thinks before shaking herself. “Hey, are you hungry?”

Bellamy raises an eyebrow. “You get delivery out here this time of night?”

“One,” she scoffs. “Brooklyn is still a part of the city so yes, you can get anything if you try hard enough, Two, you live in Queens so I don’t know why you’re acting like this is the sticks, and three, I was going to make something.”

His other eyebrow shoots up to join the first. “You cook now?”

She gasps, clasping a hand to her heart in offense. “How dare. For all you know, I could be a culinary wizard these days.”

“And yet, I doubt it.” He grins back at her as he ducks out of the room and she lets it go because it’s not like he’s wrong.

When he comes out of the bathroom, she’s got water boiling on the stove, and his smile is dazzling when he spots the familiar blue box on the counter.

“Please tell me you have salsa.”

“We’ve been over this, additions to the already perfect Kraft recipe are an abomination and not to be tolerated in my home,” she says, primly.

She rolls her eyes at him as he rummages through the fridge. “If you must, mix some in your half when I’m not looking. Heathen.” She hands him a wooden spoon and the box. “Your penance is making this while I shower.”

“Your master plan is revealed.”

“Har, har. I can make box mac and cheese.”

“Can you?”

She shuts the door on his response and turns on the shower, collapsing on the closed toilet— _Octavia trained him well_ —to pull herself together while the water heats up.

She’s not stupid; she’s always known that she loved Bellamy. Hell, she’s even known she was probably in love with him at some point. But between losing him and everything else, she’d locked all of that away so deep that bringing it back all at once makes her head spin, her heart race, and her palms sweat. It feels a lot more like mind-numbing, gut-clenching terror than romance novels would lead you to believe.

She peels off his t-shirt and climbs into the shower, leaning her forehead against the cool tile while the hot water rains down on her, focusing on her breathing and trying to empty her mind so her subconscious can sort it all out.

_What does this change?_

Nothing, it changes nothing. Tonight is- well, she doesn’t know what tonight is, some kind of wonderful, inexplicable fluke. A gift from the universe she’s done nothing to deserve. She’s going to treasure it forever, but she’s not going to let it mean anything. She’d always promised herself if she somehow managed to make things right with Bellamy, she’d follow his lead and not ever push him for more than he could give. Just because they’d taken an unexpected turn doesn’t change the A plan.

Resolved, she washes up and gets out, hopping a little when her bare feet meet cold cement. She dries herself off and wipes down the mirror, glaring at her reflection. “Do not fuck this up.”

When she comes out, Bellamy’s putting the mac and cheese on her little dinette table, two forks in the pot and no salsa in sight. For a second she’s right back in his kitchen in Astoria, and he’s setting the cracked linoleum table under the window that always held his mom’s applesauce jar vase stuffed with the sun-faded plastic daisies that Octavia would never let him move, let alone throw away.

Clarke blinks away the memory and pulls out a chair, perching cross-legged like she always does, and when Bellamy sits across from her, he’s smiling to himself like he’s got his own set of memories playing in his head. She’s unspeakably glad they’re good ones.

She forks up a mouthful of radioactive orange but pauses before she eats it, glaring at him suspiciously. “You made it like the box says? No additions?”

Bellamy holds up his hands in surrender. “Your house, your rules. I promise not to try and sneak you anything that naturally occurs on this planet.”

“Snob.” She takes a bite, making obnoxious, over the top yummy noises.

He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you still eat this stuff.”

“What are you talking about? It has food groups,” she says, spearing another bite. “There’s grain, and dairy, and..orange.” She gestures a little too emphatically on the last one and a glop of noodle go flies off, landing smack dab in the middle of Bellamy’s forehead.

They freeze, and she tries to hold back, she really does, but he looks so fucking ridiculous with lumpy orange paste on his face and the way he’s going sort of cross-eyed, like he can see it if he tries hard enough, that she busts out laughing. His eyes narrow and _oh shit_ , she knows that look. Before she can duck he flicks a forkful directly at her and it splatters across her nose.

Obviously, the only thing to do is retaliate so, fast as lightning, she sticks a hand in the pot and leans across the table to smear a fistful all over his face. He catches her wrist and holds her in place, grabbing a handful of his own and smushing it directly into her wet hair.

“You dick!”

“You started it!”

Clarke goes for the pot, but he twists out of his chair, still holding her wrist and pulling her with him. She lunges again, but he gets around behind her, hugging her to him and holding her just far enough away that she can’t reach it. She twists and squirms, trying to get free but he doesn’t give an inch even as his laughter goes breathy and she realizes he’s hard again.

She feels herself go damp and wiggles against him again, slower and more pointedly this time.

“You know, we should probably wash this off as fast as possible. When it sets, it turns to cement.” Her voice has gone husky and her muscles warm and loosen as he presses against her ass.

“Good call,” he says into her shoulder, biting down a little as he swings her around and starts walking them towards the bathroom, not breaking his hold at all.

In the shower, with Bellamy wrapped around her, bracing her up against the wall and gasping her name over and over as he thrusts into her, she thinks that if this is all she gets, it could be enough.

Later, when they’re toweled off and dressed again, and Bellamy shows no inclination to leave, Clarke makes cocoa, snags two of her chunky knit throws and takes him out on the roof.

Red Hook isn’t exactly the most bustling of neighborhoods during the day, and the studio is close enough to the water that at night it’s surprisingly quiet on the roof. She leads him to the lounge chairs and firepit Niylah’s set up and pulls out the cushions while he fiddles with the kindling and gets a fire going. The shrubs and ornamental trees and grasses shush against each other as they sway in the faint breeze coming in off the ocean creating a white noise blanket for the snap crackle pop of the sticks and logs when they catch.

“What?” She asks when he shakes his head laughs a little as she blows on her cocoa before taking a sip.

“Nothing. I just never thought I’d see the day when Clarke Griffin drank anything without putting a shot in it first.”

She freezes, and he winces. “Fuck. Shit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-“

“No.” She rolls her shoulders; she’d known this was all too easy. “No, it’s okay. I don’t- it’s not like it’s a big secret or anything. Hiding- pretending my past isn’t my past makes everything feel dishonest. Besides, you more than anyone deserve to ask anything you want, so…”

She leaves the offer hanging, and he’s quiet for a minute, looking out at the lights across the bay.

“Do you-“ He glances at her. “Do you miss it?”

She lets out the breath she was holding. It’s Bellamy, of course, he’d go right to the hard stuff.

“What? Heroin?” She doesn’t need the clarification, just wants to buy herself a little time.

“Yeah.” Now he looks at her, and the firelight softens his face, his eyes, makes him glow.

“Yes.” She says it softly but with just a hint of a defiant edge. _This is me. This is who I am, take it or leave it._  “Not like, I don’t know, not like something I have to have or in a way I can’t manage but yeah, when I’m scared or anxious or angry or depressed or whatever, there’s always the knowledge that I could make it go away if I was okay with losing everything in exchange.”

They’re both quiet for a minute, staring into the fire.

“Six years is a long time.”

She shrugs. “It is what it is.”

“No, seriously Clarke. I know the stats. Getting off and staying off is incredibly hard for most addicts.”

“I have a good support network and...and a lot to fight for. And a lot to fight with. A lot of people aren’t lucky enough to be in my position with my resources.”

“That’s true enough, but that doesn’t make what you’ve done, what you’re doing, any less impressive.”

“Thank you.”

There’s another long beat of silence, but she doesn’t try to break it.

“Is it, uh. Do you have any problems with the kids or the tenants?”

“Why? Because artists are a bunch of degenerate hippies?” She smiles a little, so he’ll know she’s teasing. “No, I mean, I don’t know. I guess sometimes? We have a zero-tolerance policy for most stuff and are really upfront about it. People drink, and there’s a bunch of pot around, but we’re really clear that hard stuff can’t come in either as a substance or while you’re on it. And we aren’t a public program so we can refuse to take kids that are still, you know, actively using.”

He snorts. “You guys tell a bunch of teenagers not to do something and they actually listen to you?”

“Surprisingly enough, yeah. Roan does the orientation lecture and ends it by- wait, sorry there’s backstory. Okay, so Roan’s really into scarification as body art. I guess tattoos are too mainstream?”

Bellamy makes a face.

“Yeah, my intense hipster shit has nothing on Roan. So, he’s got this sprawling torso scar pattern thing happening and-“ She starts to giggle as she talks, picturing the last orientation. “At the end of his speech, he takes his shirt off and adds a new scar, all while making intense, unrelenting eye contact.”

She bursts into laughter when she sees the look on Bellamy’s face. “It’s insane, right? It scares the hell out of most of the kids; they’re generally on their best behavior around him.”

“He...scars himself.”

“While staring. The stare’s the part that makes it really weird.”

“Wait.” Bellamy frowns. “Is this the guy that Raven and Gina started…”

“Fucking? Yeah. I didn’t know you knew him.”

“I don’t, Murphy was telling me about him.”

“And you recognized him by the torso art and not, oh, I don’t know, his name?”

“Everyone’s got a _name_ , Clarke. Wrap around torso scar art is _unique_.”

She laughs harder. “He’d be so pleased with that sentiment.”

“Anyway, I guess your boy took his shirt off in the middle of the bar to intimidate some frat boys into giving up their pool table.”

Clarke’s full-on wheezing now. “Oh my god, he _would._ ”

She hiccups a little as her laughter sputters out, and Bellamy watches her, a sort of wistful expression on his face.

“What?”

“I missed your laugh,” he says, quietly.

It’s such a little thing, stated with so little fuss, but Clarke’s heart surges and her chest aches.

“I missed you too.” It’s such an inadequate way of encompassing the last six years but from the way he swallows and nods—jerky, like he’s also got something too big to say stuck in his throat—she thinks he gets it.

Though she’d opened up the floor for questions, he doesn’t seem inclined to ask anything else. They chat about nothing, swapping stories of the things they’d missed in each other’s lives. She laughs so hard she shoots hot chocolate out of her nose at the way he makes his voice all shrill imitating Octavia’s outrage over Lincoln asking how she’d feel about having kids one day—” _Me?_ A _mother?_ Hamsters make better mothers than I would, and they _eat their young,_ Bellamy. I don’t know why he even brought it up, you’re going to have a litter, and we can just borrow one.”

She nearly makes him cry describing the process of replacing the lighting in the shop—”Roan wanted to _repel_ down from the ceiling to put in the bulbs after we hung the light fixtures. Like, buy climbing gear supposedly just to change lightbulbs. He’s a lunatic. Did I tell you about the climbing wall he’s campaigning to put in the back? If I don’t keep an eye on him, he’s going to build a parkour track. You know who does parkour, Bellamy? _Assholes._ ”

Eventually, the midnight blue sky starts to go cobalt around the edges and Clarke puts out the fire while Bellamy gathers the mugs and blankets, neatly folding and stacking them. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s a sweet if pointless gesture; she’s a dedicated devotee of the just-toss-it-in-a-pile method of organization.

She dithers with the mugs in the sink, tossing them in like usual, then rinsing them out, then washing them, anything to keep him there a little longer. When she can’t stretch it out any longer without being completely obvious, she puts the dried mugs away and turns to face him. He’s leaning against the table, his arms crossed, chewing on his lip, indecision wrought in every line of his body.

“I should-”

“You could stay?” She blurts it before he can finish, hating the way the questions comes out small and pleading.

_Too much, too much, too much._

But Bellamy just relaxes, coming to some kind of a decision and nodding slowly. She catches his hand, hooking the tips of his fingers with hers and gently tugs him towards the bedroom. She digs a pair of enormous sweatpants out of the pile that functions as her closet and tosses them to him before cuddling into the bed, destroying the tidy blanket pile he’d set on the edge of it.

When he climbs in beside her she nestles into him, her breath catching then releasing in the split second he hesitates before wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. She falls asleep to his fingers carding through her hair, surrounded by the smell of cedar and sage and moss and Bellamy, smiling to herself as the slow, steady beat of his heart takes her under.

 

***

 

The next morning, or afternoon if she’s technical about it, Clarke wakes up alone, and a knot starts to form in her stomach. She staggers out of bed, debating whether finding her phone or making coffee is more imperative, and the pot she’d prioritized is halfway brewed before she realizes she can’t find her phone anywhere because she’d left her bag downstairs the night before.

_Patience is a virtue; good things come to those who wait, blah blah blah._

Still, she can’t stop herself from bouncing slightly as she waits for the coffee to finish brewing. She burns herself on the first sip as she shambles around poking through piles of paper and sketchbooks looking for a note, a sign, anything other than the folded sweatpants carefully balanced on top of her teetering closet pile to indicate she hadn’t completely broken from reality and hallucinated the entire night.

She heads for the trapdoor to get her bag, dashing back to the bedroom when she wakes up enough to realize she’s still sans pants. But when she reaches the shop, Roan greets her with _the toilet’s exploded, the front is flooding, where the fuck did the pipe wrench go_ and that sets the tone for the rest of the day.

The bright side is the plumbing failure supersedes her anxiety. The downside is that when she finally gets a chance to go through her texts and sees one from her mom—a selfie with Kane on top of a volcano, blissed-out smiles on their faces, heads tilted together _—_ and 53 from Raven ranging from _Monty went down HARD_ to _guess who else didn’t show last night_ _coincidence y/n_ to _CLAAAAAAAAAAAAARKE_ —the lack of any kind of communication from Bellamy is a fresh sucker punch.

Clarke emails the photo of her mom and Marcus to herself along with a reminder to paint it for their anniversary and sends Raven a _it’s not nice to trounce the host at their own party_ , ignoring the rest of her messages. She tries her best to control the quickening vortex of disappointment and fear that’s back in her stomach and sucking her heart and lungs into it, but after a minute acknowledges she’s failed.

Clarke clutches her phone, paralyzed with indecision, explanations, reasonable, absurd, devastating, colliding in her head. He was busy, something happened to Octavia, something came up, he’d get in touch tomorrow, he was waiting for her move, anything other than-

 _He knows he’s better off without you_.

She flinches. Somehow, in the delirious, unexpected joy of the night, she’d somehow- not forgotten, but back-burnered how this all started. She’d set aside how anxious and terrified she’d been on the way to the party, how certain she’d been that when Bellamy showed he’d turn away from her. She’s so fucking stupid, how could she possibly have thought this would turn out any other way? Of course he didn’t want to pick up where they left off, let alone make something new. What the fuck had she been thinking? She’s a wreck, a junkie, a disaster. She had no business being with anyone, near anyone, she destroys things and hurts people, that’s all she’s good for.

“Where the fuck is the godamn pipe wrench _now_? I swear to god- _Griffin_!” Roan’s roar echoes out of the bathroom, startling her out of the worsening spiral and, fuck, what is she _doing_? She jams her phone in her pocket, wishing she could bury her thoughts with it. She has responsibilities, a business; people count on her.

She sees the pipe wrench abandoned on a bench—Roan’s bench, she notes, where he would have set it—and goes to deliver it to him. No one has time for her bullshit, let alone her.

A week later, after holing up in her studio and avoiding the world under the guise of finishing up her work for the show, Clarke hears the rumble of the freight elevator starting up and knows she’s run out of luck. Failing to control her pounding heart, she turns back to the painting and waits to see how the dice fall.

“Hey, loser, I’m coming in. Be decent. Or don’t, I don’t care.”

Clarke’s heart sinks— _of course it isn’t him, he’s not going to show up unannounced, that kind of thing only happens in movies_ —as Raven slams up the heavy metal door and stomps in, taking in the discarded take out containers and dirty laundry scattered around the studio.

“This is fucking disgusting, Clarke.”

“I’m working.” She says from perch on the ladder, touching up some of the detail work the top of a panel that realistically shouldn’t be futzed with anymore or she’s going to fuck it up.

Raven stops and frowns. “I gotta admit, I was expecting you to be catatonic in that fucked up, haunted chair.”

“I love that chair.”

“That chair is a national disaster. Things have died in that chair.”

“It came from Steinhardt, so I’m not ruling that out. Finals week can be rough.”

“It’s weird to me that it doesn’t creep you out and nice try changing the subject.”

Clarke sticks the paintbrush in her back pocket, idly recognizing this as why she has paint on 98% of her clothes and climbs down. “You opened with the chair, I’m following your lead.”

“Normally it’s amusing when you play stupid, but tales of your sex life have now reached my bed, and there are so many things I’d rather being doing in there than discussing how much of a tragedy you are.”

“Gina?”

“And Roan, Harper joined his gym.”

“Is it really a gym if all they do is parkour?”

“Playground, gym, same difference and again, nice try but we’re actually talking about this for once.” Raven watches with horrified fascination as Clarke picks a wonton out of a salad abandoned on a shelf between piles of smudged rags and tubes of paint and pops it in her mouth, crunching down with a touch more viciousness than warranted. “You’re a godamn mess when you’re moping.”

“Not moping, working. This is from, I don’t know, an hour ago, it’s not gross.”

“Ha! You had it brought up the side. You’re hiding. _Moping_.”

“ _Fine_.” Clarke spins around. “Here’s what you missed on Clarke Fucks Up: I ran into Bellamy, we made a night of it, it’s over. I have work to do.”

“Clarke, hey, come on. We’re worried about you. Madi’s basically moved into the shop and Roan isn’t going to be able to keep her downstairs much longer.”

“Fuck.” Clarke freezes, appalled at herself. Of all of the kids that hang around the shop, Madi had latched onto Clarke immediately to the point where everyone calls her Clarke’s kid. She’d been dumped into the system when her parents had disappeared, and Clarke took her trust seriously, trying her best to be worthy of it. “I should’ve texted her.”

“Roan told her what happened and she’s cool, she just wants to make sure you’re okay.”

“Still.” Clarke flops down into the haunted chair; silently praying that if there are ghosts in it, they’re the vengeful kind and they’ll save her from this conversation by making themselves known and murdering her. “Are you guys all just sitting around down there discussing my sex life?”

Raven shrugs. “Pretty much, yeah.” She hoists herself up on the drafting table Clarke hasn’t decided if she’s going to burn or bronze. “Talk to me, Clarke.”

Clarke wraps one of her blankets around herself, surreptitiously burying her nose in a fold and inhaling. _Cedar_. “There isn’t anything to say.”

“Is this my penance for being absent for the first great martyrdom?” Raven asks the ceiling.

“It’s not martyrdom.”

“Clarke-”

“No, just- stop. I get why you’d think that, but it’s not.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s…” Clarke sighs. “I’m respecting the things I cannot change.”

Raven snorts.

“No, _listen._ ”

Ravne cocks her head and studies Clarke for a minute and whatever she sees has her nodding, the vaguely disgusted expression on her face morphing to seriousness.

“I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past few years, and one of the things I’ve learned is half of my problem is chasing after things to try and fix them and then falling apart when I can’t. Bellamy and I- I’ve said my part, well- the parts that needed to be said, anyway. I’ve worked my ass off to get myself to the place where I’m at, and I have responsibilities. People depend on me. _I_ depend on me to not need someone else to be whole. What Bellamy does is up to him, I’ve got my own shit to deal with, and I’m not going to go after someone who doesn’t feel like I do- did.”

Raven scowls at her. “That sounded remarkably well-adjusted up until the moronic part at the end where you’re trying to pretend like you’re over him and the two of you are just some randos whose paths crossed in the night and not the two most codependent motherfuckers I’ve ever met.”

“Wow, there’s a strong case for working it out.”

“See, that’s the crazy thing, I wouldn’t recommend that for pretty much anybody but you guys...I don’t know, made it work.”

Clarke snaps. “What do you want me to _say_ , Raven? That I’m in love with him? You win! I’m in love with him! I’m so in love with him, I can’t see straight, and it terrifies me because the last time I wanted anything this bad, it ruined my life. And I know that’s fucking stupid and this isn’t remotely the same thing, but if I- if I think about it like that, then I don’t have to think about how I much I love him and want him and how that doesn’t mean I can have him.”

At some point, she’s started crying, fat, silent tears that are just as pointless as this entire conversation.

“You know just as well as I do that loving someone isn’t always enough.” She curses herself the moment the words leave her mouth. She and Raven made a pact long ago to be grateful to Finn for bringing them together back in high school and leave it at that. They’d both coped with their grief over losing him in their own ways and ever since their relationships with him had been a taboo topic.

Raven’s face goes stony, and she shoves off the table like she’s going to leave before stopping, taking a deep, shaky breath and turning back. “You’re a mess right now, so I’m going to let that go, but dirty fucking pool, Griffin.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are; otherwise I’d kick your ass.” She throws up her hands in frustration. “I don’t get you two. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that he’s always been just as gone over you as you are over him.”

Clarke shrugs as her heart cracks in half because she _knows,_ but that doesn’t mean it matters. “It is what it is. I’m a lot to take on.”

“Stand up.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I need to get in your face and I can’t crouch without royally fucking up my leg.”

Clarke shuffles to her feet, the blanket still wrapped around her like a shroud, and Raven grabs her by the shoulders, getting right up in her face as promised. “You need to shut the fuck up with that stuff, okay? You’re too hard on yourself, Clarke. Sure you’ve done some stupid shit but who hasn’t? You’re a good person, you’re in a good place, and you deserve good things. At some point, you have to start trusting yourself and letting yourself open up.”

Clarke looks away.

“Fine, whatever.” Raven pulls her into a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hug before shoving her away and stomping towards the elevator. “I’ve said my part; you’re both adults. You’ll figure it out or you won’t.”

She turns back when she gets inside, a hand on the elevator door. “I’m only saying this once, and if you _ever_ tell anyone I said this kind of mushy, inspirational metaphor shit, I will gut you. There are crutches, and then there are braces. You depend on both of them but one holds you up, and the other helps you stand on your own.”

Clarke raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Shut the fuck up. See if I ever try to be supportive again.” She starts to pull the door down and stops again. “I’m just saying, Clarke, there’s a difference between needing and wanting.”

“I know.” Her smile comes out a little wobbly. “I’ve got everything I need.”

“Suit yourself.” The door closes with a clang, and Clarke stares at nothing as the gears rumble and take Raven down.

The next day is installation day and Clarke’s desperately grateful for the distraction. She’d spent the night sprawled out in her chair, wrestling with what Raven said, trying to argue with the voice whispering she’d done nothing to deserve forgiveness, had no right to an explanation. As soon as she’d get that voice to quiet down, the one that liked to say some variation of _what does any of it matter anyway, it’s not your decision to make_ would pop up like some satanic version of mental whack-a-mole designed to torture her.

The worst voice was the one that came after those, the one that seemed so reasonable and was the hardest to ignore. The one that told her none of it mattered, that she was better, safer, alone.

She has bags under her eyes she could live out of and guzzled nearly two full pots of coffee before she felt human enough to unlock the gate so her friends could get in to help her package and transfer the paintings. Raven had taken one look at her and proceeded to bang her head against the nearest hard surface, which happened to be the wall next to the last panel still hanging, setting Madi—self-proclaimed move manager and painting protector—off into a fury of flustered squawking.

Luckily Niylah is there to soothe her—because god knows Clarke doesn’t have it in her to soothe anyone right now— and supervise the wrapping and padding. The paintings then get handed off to Roan who stacks them carefully in the elevator and takes them down through the shop to where Gina’s waiting with the van one of her bartenders promised they could borrow from some random relative.

At one point Clarke finds herself at the eye of the chaos taking a beat to catch her breath. Her heart swells as she watches Madi and Niylah giggle when Raven elbows Roan in the gut for pulling her ponytail. Echo sticks her head up the open trap door to see if they need any more muscle and she’s struck with a wave of affection for this crew of weirdos she’s cobbled together.

Raven was right, she realizes. She is in a good place, and she does have good people; people who think she’s worth having around, that she’s deserving of their help, their laughter, their love. Maybe, just maybe, she owes it to herself, owes it to Bellamy, to do the scary thing and stop holding back.

After she’s shooed everyone out of the apartment, she locks up and heads downstairs, hurrying when she hits the ground and hears Roan yelling from the front of the shop.

“-just want to know what the fuck he thinks he’s doing here.”

“And I said it’s _not your fucking business_.” When Raven joins in, Clarke starts to run. The last time they’d started yelling at each other in the shop, the kiln had blown a fuse. She knows it logically couldn’t have been their fault, but the universe is funny, and she isn’t willing to risk it again.

When she skids out the door, she’s momentarily blinded because it’s sunny as _fuck_ and of course she left her sunglasses upstairs. The blaze of light fades to reveal Raven planted in front of Roan, hands on her hips, glare fixed on him like a laser beam, but he’s not paying attention because he’s looking over her shoulder at-

“Bellamy?”

Everyone turns to look at Clarke which is just, great. She is clearly the most equipped mentally and emotionally to handle...whatever’s happening here.

“Hey, Roan, I think I left a sweater in the office, can you unlock it for me?” Has Clarke ever really appreciated Gina the way she deserves? She comes around the side of the van, the sun beaming off her curls like a halo which is staggeringly appropriate since she’s an actual angel right now, herding a goggling Madi past Roan through the open bay door with a calm—okay, slightly obnoxious—knowing smile but honestly, Clarke will take what she can get.

“Yeah, stop being such an ass and unlock the door, Roan.” Raven shoves him when he resists the herding.

“I’m just saying-”

“No one cares, come on.” Raven shoves him in and whips around, pointing at Bellamy then Clarke. “Stop being dumb.”

Then she’s gone, and they’re alone.

“So, that’s Roan,” Clarke says, lamely.

“He seems...great.” Bellamy shifts awkwardly from foot to foot, and she realizes he’s holding two cups of coffee. She starts to reach for one before pulling back, assumptions and all.

“Is that-”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, here.” He shoves the cup into her hand, and even though she’s already caffeinated to the point of vibrating and hearing colors, she gulps it, grateful for something to do with her hands, her mouth.

“I, uh. I thought maybe you could use a hand. With moving the paintings.” He makes a little face like he’s not dealing with this situation any better than she is.

“How...how’d you know we were moving it today?”  _Again with the inanity._  If this is the way it’s going to be between them from here on out, she’s moving to Alaska.

“Miller. Well-” He squints at the sky, trying to recall the correct point of contact. “Roan told Gina who told Monroe who told Miller.”

“Jesus, fuck, do they have a phone tree? Do they have binders to tell them who to call in case of different scenarios? Is there a crisis communications plan?” Clarke knows she’s babbling but she’s lost any and all control over herself.

“Probably, yeah.”

A car hits a pothole down the road, and they both jump at the _clang_.

“I…” Bellamy shovels a hand through his hair, tugging on it, so it sticks up in tufts, which, combined with his slightly too wide panic-eyes, makes him look a little deranged.

“Fuck, I hate this,” he mutters, reaching into his pocket. “Here.”

The package he thrusts at her looks like a balled up paper bag, but she can tell from the weight there’s something in it. “I see your already legendary wrapping skills have only gotten better with age.”

“Yeah, they’re like a fine wine.”

She smiles a little at the self-deprecating tone as she juggles her coffee and the package before she sets the cup down on the ground. Then she unwraps the bag and drops the object inside into her palm and all the breath in her body leaves her in a _whoosh_.

It’s a watch.

Her dad’s watch, to be specific.

The watch he’d worn every day she could remember up until the day before he died when he gave it to her. _To remember me by_ he’d said like she needed a totem for that. _Some way other than this_ he’d clarified, meaning frailer than he had any right to be, lying in the hospital bed hooked up to so many beeping, hissing machines that she’d felt like they were on a spaceship in some horrible alternate universe where this bone white, skinny shell of a man was supposed to be her father.

The watch she’d traded one night towards the end that she’s desperately ashamed to remember. She’d been low on cash and too strung out to find an ATM when there was a fix right in front of her, and it was the one thing of value she had on her besides the phone she’d been dimly aware of needing to function. She doesn’t even remember who she traded the watch to; they were a faceless blur holding out a crumpled saran wrapped bundle of powder. She never, ever thought she’d see it again but here it is. In her hand. Because Bellamy gave it back to her.

“How-” That’s as much as she can choke out before her throat closes. Her eyes prickle and burn, and her vision goes blurry as she stares at it.

“I saw you-” He clears his throat. “I was at the party where you traded it, I don’t know if you knew.”

She shakes her head, mute with shock and shame and grief and gratitude and a thousand other things she can’t begin to name.

“Yeah, well. I saw you, so I got it back.” He shrugs but he can’t- _she_ can’t let him act like this isn’t a big deal. She knows how much he must’ve had to pay to get it back and she knows how tight money was for him and when she puts it all together, her brain shorts out at the magnitude of the gesture.

It hits her like a hammer that he’s been holding on to this for _six years,_ and something in her heart bursts free and takes flight.

“Bellamy-”

“No, wait, me first this time.”

She nods and knows her accompanying smile is wobbly from all the different emotion it contains but whatever Bellamy sees in it is enough that he smiles back, tentative and hopeful.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left like that, should’ve called, should’ve, I don’t know, not been such a cowardly fucking dumbass.”

The last bit makes Clarke laugh because she can hear Raven in it.

“I panicked, Clarke. You were- you are- I love you so fucking much. I’ve loved you forever and losing you, going through all of that, it wrecked me. I- you should’ve seen me, Clarke. I was so, so angry. I became the worst version of myself. I nearly lost my job, lost Octavia. You’re not the only one who knows how to self-destruct.”

“Bellamy-”

“I’m not saying that to- it’s not a competition, I don’t mean it like that. I’m trying to, I don’t know, give you a reference so you can understand- The other night, it was _everything_ , seeing you again, holding you, fuck, just being near you was like...waking up, except I didn’t know I’d been asleep. The next morning, I just- what if it all went wrong and I lost you _again_? I didn’t- I can’t- I was terrified of going through that, turning into that again, and I panicked.”

Bellamy takes a step towards her, his hand twitching a little like he wants to reach for her so bad he can’t help it but doesn’t know if he should. She sways towards him, an involuntary reflex that she doesn’t fight because she wants to close the distance just as badly.

“You said I kept saving you but, I can’t, I’m not- I’m a mess too, Clarke, just in a different way. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to save me because that doesn’t work either. So, I don’t know where that leaves us, but I thought- I had to talk to you, to tell you how I felt- feel because letting you go just because I’m scared isn’t even tragic, it’s pitiful.”

He trails off, and she stares at him. He’s- this is- they’re ridiculous.

“You are a fucking dumbass.” He blinks at her, taken aback. “But so am I. I don’t need you to save me, Bellamy, and I don’t want to save you either. I save me, and you save you, or, I don’t know, it’d be great if no one needs saving but I’m not asking for miracles here.”

He laughs a little at that .

“But, yeah, we’re both messes in our own unique and spectacular ways and I don’t care, I’d rather be a mess with you than alone, always and forever. We can save each other, the important thing is we do it because we want to, not because we need to.”

She’s pretty sure she hears Raven snort but chooses to believe it’s because of something in the shop and not because she’s spying.

“I don’t want to be with you because I need you, I don’t want to need anyone. I want to be with you because I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

“Yeah?” His smile is a bright, crooked sun, straining to escape his face and she knows hers is just as big.

“Yeah.”

He looks at her, and she looks back, and the space between them hums as they stand on the dirty, beautiful, hyperreal, technicolor Brooklyn street. Neither one moves, but this time it isn’t because Clarke doesn’t know how to close the distance, but because she wants to memorize, to savor the moment. She knows Bellamy feels the same because she still speaks their language and so does he, and she knows that when she paints this moment, it’ll be with pure, fully-saturated pigment and gold leaf.

He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it. He unfolds her fingers from around the watch and buckles it onto her wrist. This time he’s gentle not like she’s brittle, but like she’s precious.

“So, was this your big romantic gesture?”

“Yeah, O said I should rent a tux and show up at your show, but I figured you’d probably appreciate a hand.”

Bellamy tucks her hair behind her ear, and she turns her face into his palm and kisses it, breathing in the cedar, sage, and citrus on his skin.

“Oh my _god_ , will you just kiss her already?” Clarke glances over and Madi’s hanging off the edge of the doorway, her face a comical mixture of delight and disgust that she must’ve learned from Raven.

But Madi’s wrong because Clarke’s done waiting and before Bellamy can move she steps into his space and runs her fingers along his cheekbone, dancing her fingertips over the freckles.

“Fairy-kissed,” she whispers.

And then she kisses him.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos/comments are the absolute bestest and thank you for reading.


End file.
